Re: Notes to a Young Computational Biologist

This is a story of how clueless I can be, but how sometimes, given a sufficient number of opportunities, I can become clueful again.

On 13 March 2007, Bosco Ho wrote a post entitled “Notes to a Young Computational Biologist” on his Trapped in the USA blog. I don’t remember how I happened to come across this post the first time, because I wasn’t reading blogs systematically then, but something about this topic clicked in me, and on 25 March I posted a long comment about some things I thought Dr. Ho had omitted.

Time passed, and in October or November, I received an email from a recruiter who wanted to interest me in a bioinformatics or programming job on the West Coast. I couldn’t figure out where she had heard of me, except that she mentioned in the email that she had seen my name on the boscoh.com web site. This mystified me, because I had forgotten all about the events in March. I did a little poking around on the web site, but I couldn’t find my own name. So I concluded that she was completely mistaken—that she actually wanted to recruit Bosco Ho but had sent me the email in error—and I decided not to respond.

The benefit of this apparent error was that I learned (for what I thought was the first time) about Dr. Ho’s site, which is full of great writing and useful information. I now work with quite a few scientists who are experts at protein structure, but this is a new field for me because I was trained as a DNA jockey (you know—molecular biology, cloning, sequencing, and all that). Trapped in the USA provided me with additional background reading on protein structure.

At the beginning of this year, I decided it was time to start another web site, so I registered sphaerula.com. One of the things my hosting provider offers is an installation of WordPress, and that’s how I got started blogging. Since mid-February, I have been immersed in reading biology and bioinformatics blogs and writing posts of my own. I’ve discovered many wonderful blogs, and I discovered Trapped in the USA for the third time.

On weekends, I have been methodically reading blogs from beginning to end. (This is going to take me a long time as I follow the branches from the blogrolls.) When I began reading Trapped in the USA, I rediscovered Dr. Ho’s “Notes to a Young Computational Biologist” post, and I rediscovered my comments.

So in the course of a little more than 11 months, I’ve made a discovery, a rediscovery, and a rerediscovery. The difference is that now I am fully engaged in blogging and in reading blogs, and this time the discovery will stick with me. I know now that Dr. Ho is a widely respected blogger in the bioinformatics blogging community, and I won’t forget it this time.

By the way, if you happen to be that recruiter, I apologize for not responding. I love the West Coast, having grown up in Oregon and earned my Ph.D. at Berkeley. But I have a good job, I love Boston, and I’m not inclined to move. But I’m happy to recommend a talented computational biologist who is named Bosco Ho.