Seeking suggestions: Less Wrong Biology 101

A lot of people would be interested in neuroscience / neurobiology, I think. (Me included, at least if it goes beyond the very basics like "neurons are connected via axons and dendrites and there are these action potentials".)

I'd be interested. Overall, I'd prefer a focus on foundational/technical topics than the most recent Awesome New Study, although if you can tie in both, that would be great. My past experience with biology tended to involve a bunch of technical terms being thrown at me and my eyes glazing over. Are there a handful of broad principles that constrain anticipation about biological systems or processes that you could highlight?

Yeah, sure, it sounds fun!

If you're a molecular biology person, I would be interested in an article if there are any good human efforts to design proteins, and what sort of challenges they face and what techniques they use to overcome those challenges. Or even designing whole living systems - we seem to like futurism around here, so "speculative bioengineering" could be fun.

what are some topics you would like to see discussed?

The biology of aging and age-related disease.

This is based on guessing what bioinformatics means: How close is our ability to handle information to the complexity of living things? What compromises need to be made to get relatively good predictions? What are the frontiers?

I'm interested in how far away current technology and understanding is from simulating the most primitive existing single celled organism on a molecular or atomic level.

I would love to know more about the processes by which biomass energy is transferred about the ecosystem, (the actual organic processes involved, relative efficiencies, etc.).

This is a great idea!

Some topics that are sort of relevant to LW and overlaps enough with biology that posts focusing on the biological side of things would be interesting:

• The brain: Much of LW is about it's abstract/computational behaviour, but what is it actually, you know, physically.
• Prosthesis, augmented intelligence, organic computers, etc.
• Population dynamics. Just my intuition saying I have vague memories abaut this having a bunch of interesting examples of math relevant to the singularity.
• Nanotech is all around us, and what it has a hard or easy time doing might say a few thing about what the artificial kind will be able to do?

... Ok most of these are sort of not very much biology and kinda cheesy, but I tried.

I'd be interested (am slowly working my way through a Master's in Bioinformatics while trying to hold down a day job). No idea of what'd be interesting, because either I already know about it or I don't know enough to know it's interesting, IYSWIM.

I think I read the suggestion somewhere above already, but I'd also be very interested in your take on ageing. Most people around here seem to be from the technical sphere and thus they probably lack the necessary intimacy with the topic of biology and ageing to competently evaluate some of its more intricate aspects.

Specifically your evaluation of Aubrey de Grey's viewpoint and his methods would interest me a lot, if that is something you've looked into and feel competent commenting on. I've read around here that some people donate to his SENS foundation, but if one is not a biologist you can't really evaluate the approach of his methods. I've tried to evaluate his competency by listening to the arguments of his critics and was largely struck by how poor they were - but that in itself is obviously just an indicator and not an evaluation of his approach.

I'm careful to not be biased about this, but let's face it - probably everyone here wants Aubrey to succeed. Still I'm skeptical if the human body is really as malleable as he suggests it is... I'm thinking of problems like protein folding and whatnot.

Your thoughts would be much appreciated.

I always wanted to know more about genetics, but didn't have enough time to study it. Basic tutorial + good links + outline of current state-of-art would be interesting to me. I do understand that it's a bit off-topic for this forum however.

In terms of what I imagine most people would be curious about:

• How is biology research done?

• How is medication developed?

• Why do some things work for some people?

• What are genes? Why are they so important? Are they me? <- the last one's a stretch...

For LW to know:

• What overlap does bioinformatics have with normal probability theory? What methods are common?

• How does it compare to other engineering fields?

This would be great! I'd love to know more about sleep, but I hear there's not much known about it anyway.