Last year, Research Scholars Gordon Webster and Alex Lancaster published Python for the Life Sciences through Leanpub. Last month, Leanpub posted interviews with each of them.
Here’s a snippet of Gordon’s interview, published on Feb 17:
I mean, I think the one thing I would say is that – yes – that lay people do tend to think of scientists as being almost kind of like Mr. Spock – that is logical, and everything is kind of decision making, devoid of all that other human baggage like emotion and ambition and greed and all that stuff.
And the truth is, it’s really still very much a human activity. And the application of the scientific method – there’s this kind of ideal view of it, if you look at the books on the philosophy of science and Karl Popper and all this kind of stuff. There’s this very idealized, sort of Platonic ideal of what the scientific method is. But when you start to combine science and commerce, then all that human stuff, it still plays a role. And honestly, it plays a role even in academic research.
And here’s a piece from Alex’s interview, published on the 21st:
I started life thinking I would be an astrophysicist, basically. It was where I was originally when I was an undergrad. And actually I spent about a week in a radio telescope down in Canberra – a while ago now, shall we say? Another century. And I realized that that wasn’t really going to be it for me for the rest of my life. Astrophysics has changed a lot since, but there was a lot of sitting in very quiet, desolate places, pouring over data, and it sounds very glamorous on the outside – but the reality of the day-to-day just turned out that it didn’t really appeal to me.
So, trying to figure out what to do, I decided to finish my engineering degree, which I started with. But I was always interested in evolution from a very young age, I think [from] when I picked up Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, which was written sometime in the 80s. I was just fascinated with the idea of these biomorphs, which were these little creatures that he had built evolutionarily on a Mac. It was nothing to do with real biology, but it was very – basically you could construct these creatures from this very simple genetic code. And it sort of always stayed with me.
Check out the full interviews, and the book!
This post is a perspective of the author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Ronin Institute.
