Comment by marcus_holmes
2 years ago
We don't gatekeep tech. Literally anyone can create a PR and submit it to an open repo for consideration.
You can't do the same for biotech. You need a PhD, a reputation, a ton of funding, a bunch of papers, to be even considered for "this person has a clue about this medical issue and might have an answer".
Listening to maintainers talk about their experiences dealing with random weird PRs from random weird submitters, I'm not sure we're doing it right by not gatekeeping it more ;)
It’s not gatekeeping, it’s being able to contribute by having foundational knowledge.
Anyone can (and people often do) make big contributions in health, but it’s hard without deep knowledge.
Not everyone who does software engineering needs a computer science degree.
Meanwhile if I head out to the pub on the weekend I hear people post cancer diagnosis waxing lyrical about how they’re beating their breast cancer with surgery+chemo/radiotherapy with a diet high in antioxidants, ignorant of the fact that one of the ways radiotherapy and chemotherapy works is by sctually causing oxidative damage, so they’re working against it. One of the many ways that doing your own research is counterproductive
To contribute to fundamentally new knowledge in software or CS also can require quite a lot of background learning though. I think the bigger culprit is that biomedical studies are fucking expensive. There needs to be a big upfront commitment, so there is naturally going to be more reliance on credentialism/gatekeeping. If 99% of random self-driven software projects turn out useless to the rest of the world, that's no big deal, and then we just hear about the 1%. But it's not possible in biology.
The time required to test/verify any “answer” in medicine is years or decades and not seconds/hours/days like in software development.
And well experimenting without being almost entirely sure of what you’re doing (and even then sometimes) might have very terrible outcomes.