Smart people should do biology
In school, it often felt like an unspoken rule: the “smart kids” did physics and chemistry, while biology was relegated to those willing to memorize disconnected facts. A high school teacher once told me biology was his least favorite science because “there are just too many things to remember.” He argued that physics offered laws, and chemistry gave the periodic table—but biology? It was a mess of facts with no unifying principles. While I see his point, he was wrong. Biology is not about memorization. Biology is about exploration, grappling with complexity, and engaging in some of the most exciting intellectual challenges of our time.
The Challenge of Biology: Thinking in Systems
Biology’s complexity isn’t a weakness; it’s a strength. Unlike physics, where idealized models simplify reality, or chemistry, where periodic trends provide predictability, biology forces us to confront the messy, dynamic systems of life itself. Even seemingly simple tasks—like growing E. coli in a lab—require navigating intricate dependencies. A friend of mine, who quit a PhD in CRISPR research, described it perfectly: “If I left for a weekend, all my cells would die.” Biology doesn’t let you assume a “spherical cow.” It demands that you grapple with the full richness of life from the start.
Take the example of yeast aging research, as described by Laura Deming in her week-long exploration of whether it’s possible to make yeast immortal. Her approach exemplifies the intellectual thrill of thinking deeply about biology. She started with curiosity, asking herself what it might feel like to “be a yeast cell.” Then, armed with data from BioNumbers and a deep understanding of yeast physiology, she built a mental model of the cell’s inner workings. She questioned how aging affects everything from cell size to ATP concentration, and how sporulation—a process some yeast use to regenerate—might extend lifespan. Her exploration wasn’t just about finding answers; it was about wrestling with the unknown, articulating plausible hypotheses, and imagining novel experiments.
This kind of thinking—creative, systems-level, and deeply exploratory—is where biology shines. It’s not about memorizing facts but about asking better questions. What causes yeast to age? Can we reverse it? What does it even mean to be immortal? Biology challenges us to think not just deeply but differently.
Why Biology’s Complexity Is a Feature, Not a Bug
Critics often claim that biology lacks the elegance of physics or chemistry. They say it’s messy, rooted in Earth-specific conditions, and dependent on brute-force methods like genetic screens or high-throughput assays. And they’re right—biology is messy. But this messiness is not a flaw; it’s the nature of life. Biology is about understanding systems that are constantly changing, adapting, and interacting in ways we don’t yet fully understand.
This is why tools like AI have been transformative. Take protein folding: for decades, it was a grand challenge, with no clear path to a solution. Then AlphaFold cracked it by analyzing more data than any human could process. AI isn’t replacing the need for biological insight; it’s augmenting our ability to think at scales and levels of complexity that were previously unimaginable. I’ve recently been exploring how AI can augment humans in understanding biology. I’ve managed to feed the BioNumbers database into a language model as context which allows me to make ‘back-of-envelope’ calculations and rapidly gain intuition for fields of biology I’m unfamiliar with.
Biology’s Questions Are Deeper Than You Think
One reason biology gets dismissed as a “memorization science” is how it’s taught. Students are asked to recall what mitochondria do or to label the parts of a cell. But this approach misses the point. Biology isn’t about knowing the names of things; it’s about understanding how they work and interact.
Imagine if, instead of memorizing facts, students tackled questions like:
How much energy do mitochondria produce in a day?
How many rubisco proteins are in a leaf?
How long would it take for a single E. coli cell to grow into a 1-gram colony under ideal conditions?
How many mutations accumulate in DNA over 10 germline generations?
How fast do neurons develop in a fruit fly as it transitions from larva to adult?
These are not just trivia; they are ways of thinking that build intuition about life. They challenge students to reason quantitatively, think probabilistically, and wrestle with the fundamental constraints of biological systems. This is where biology’s true beauty lies: in asking the kinds of questions that reveal the hidden logic of life.
Why Biology Needs the Best Minds
Biology is not just about medicine. It has implications for nearly every field, from energy and sustainability to artificial intelligence and engineering. Humans have mastered the manipulation of inorganic matter, but biology holds the key to a new frontier of innovation. Imagine constructing buildings that repair themselves, designing energy systems inspired by photosynthesis, or creating organisms that sequester carbon at scale. These are not science fiction—they are the logical extensions of what we already know.
The economic and societal potential of biology rivals that of physics or chemistry. But to realize this potential, we need the best minds. Biology deserves the same intellectual prestige as the “hard sciences,” not because it’s harder or easier, but because it’s equally essential. Its complexity is an opportunity, not a barrier.
Biology Needs You
This is an invitation, not a hierarchy. Smart people shouldn’t just do physics, chemistry, or computer science—they should do biology too. Not because it’s easier or harder, but because it’s vital. Our understanding of biology is still in its infancy, and the field needs creative thinkers who are unafraid to ask bold questions and wrestle with complexity.
So, here’s my challenge: mess around with biology. Start by asking hard questions. Explore its untapped potential. If you’re unsure where to begin, I recommend trying my long-context prompt on Kaggle that teaches how to ask and answer the kinds of questions that build biological intuition. The future belongs to those who embrace life in all its messy, fascinating glory.
Completely agreed with the premise. I had something of the opposite experience: Truly excellent high school bio teacher, mediocre physics teacher, terrible chem teacher. I’d wanted to be a physicist since I was 5, but entered college wanting to be a biochem major.
That lasted all of one semester. Problem was, the intro courses for bio were full of (and geared towards) the hundreds of pre-med students who just wanted and needed to memorize the facts. Physics had a separate track for majors and non-majors. Chem had separate tracks for pre-med and physical science folks. Not bio, so I was stuck mostly re-learning things I already knew. Ironically, in my professional life two decades later, I don’t deal with biology itself at all, but I make extensive use of the little bits of complex systems analysis and modeling I picked up in my bio, biochem, biophysics, and biostatistics classes. I just didn’t need those at all in the classes themselves.
That ties into a part I find interesting. In society, we accord doctors very high status among professionals, but accord biologists comparatively low status among academics. Being a doctor is very hard and requires way more than just intelligence, I certainly couldn’t do the job. But, I struggle to think of another field where we accord what are, effectively, highly skilled technicians more status than we do research scholars.
I’ve been known to say that, done right, biology, and even more so psychology, should be the most difficult sciences, and physics is simple. Most people really don’t get what I mean, but the few that do are invariably interesting to talk to.
Thank you for your comment. I get what you mean. I predict with the increasingly intelligence and adoption of AI, that technical skills will become lower valued, whereas the creativity/generativity/coordination skills you refer to will take their place. I draw a comparison to how being able to “code a website” infers downtrending levels of skill today compared to 10 years ago, 20 years … etc.