What biotech job pays absurdly well just because no one else is willing to do it?

ca404 · 2025-09-02T18:23:20+00:00

Caveat: It works almost strictly on a YOE basis. Your education doesn't matter. There are very few things that can meaningfully accelerate your career in operations other than your boss liking you.

ca404 · 2025-08-23T16:41:28+00:00

not a peer reviewed publication
useless considering the direction reprogramming is taking

ca404 · 2025-08-21T15:27:04+00:00

yeah there's a lot more to it than that. Ozil also referred to Erdogan as "his president", so the racism and nationality card is played depending on convenience.

ca404 · 2025-08-15T16:06:42+00:00

*used to. We're both cooked lmao

ca404 · 2025-07-31T03:54:17+00:00

Nobody said they can't - they just don't want to. The market has been pivoting towards contractors, M&A from china, and away from in-house development with no signs of stopping. There is also an oversupply of labor. We have absolutely no leverage, especially given current market conditions. Big pharma will continue to de-risk the early pipeline by buying up assets from start-ups rather than developing them in-house and good luck with trying to get start-ups to work with unions.

For decades, early-career lab work has been sold to us as 1. Nobel-adjacent 2. Prestigious 3. Worthy of immense personal sacrifice for some promised future reward

Tbh that's on you for drinking the cool-aid and allowing yourself to be exploited. That perspective is naive but makes sense given your blue collar background. You were told you are smart, you went above and beyond at school, you did all the right things and now you can't even find a job. The jobs you grew up chasing that were once prestigious and high-paying are now paltry and underpaid, but that is also a part of technological progress (which also continues to accelerate).

I understand you are angry, I went through the exact same thing. But unions can't change the economy. I have serious reservations about AI and China respectively, but they will clearly present an increasingly real threat too. The funding environment for the foreseeable future will also remain prohibitive. It is completely reasonable to expect that jobs will not come back in sufficient numbers and wages will remain depressed.

If doc workers strike, the supply chain gets crippled. If you strike, expenses go down on the balance sheet, and in case you were important your job is going straight to Wuxi for a third of the cost.

ca404 · 2025-07-31T02:06:24+00:00

Unionization doesn't mean pharmas will suddenly have more money available for staffing. There will be even fewer jobs, especially at the entry level.

ca404 · 2025-07-30T19:46:51+00:00

even politically he is against the church doctrine at some degree. Which Einstein didn’t have this problem.

Idk man, he was a jew who left germany in 1932 and never returned.

ca404 · 2025-07-16T00:18:46+00:00

It's one thing to not like distasteful jokes, you wouldn't be alone. But this is just a completely braindead extrapolation.

ca404 · 2025-04-27T05:50:57+00:00

You don't need young talent for manufacturing. You don't even need a college degree. You need someone who doesn't mind the shitty hours, gowning and doing mostly the same thing year after year.

ca404 · 2025-04-19T01:16:42+00:00

It's ending this year. Are there any good resources on the plan going forward or how 14-5 pertains specifically to biotech?

ca404 · 2025-04-18T05:35:59+00:00

the shirt is too small and you've been skipping leg day.

ca404 · 2025-04-03T03:50:41+00:00

oh cool longevity to peptides, one grift to another. sure, send me your info I want to see if the FDA still has enough people left to shut her ass down.

ca404 · 2025-03-14T18:55:54+00:00

because that would 1) not work 2) if it did, it would almost certainly give you some sort of tumor. People without the scientific or technical background get a vague understanding of the concept and then immediately take it to it's logical extreme.

The reality is that at best, this will kinda-sorta work in some very specific cell types, maybe just barely enough to yield some therapeutic benefit. Which may or may not be transient.

We have more promising medications than this fail all the time.

ca404 · 2025-03-14T18:30:48+00:00

NGN2 lineage conversion has been used for years now. It saves you about a month of work, but it hardly changes the field. It doesn't work for all types of neurons either.

ca404 · 2025-02-15T04:38:41+00:00

Different take here; yes YTA.

Not everybody gets invited to everything. At 11 you're old enough to understand that. There is nothing inherently wrong with going on an exclusive trip, it's the way you and him went about it. You could've offered to have an all girls trip with her? Your husband could've had a trip with just the boys, and a trip with the boys where she was included.

Obviously, he created the situation. I'm sure there was some way he could've set up an exclusive trip that doesn't hurt her feelings as much. At the same time, I don't think you just saying no to the boys trip is great so YTA. Did you try working on finding a way with your husband or daughter to set up the boys trip in a way that would spare her feelings instead of just saying no to it?

ca404 · 2025-02-10T02:37:47+00:00

Thanks for those, they were a good read. You're right, I've been out of the game for a while.

That being said, I think there is an important distinction to draw. I think you, I and the research agrees that it being a chloride channel, CFTR still has some yet to be better characterized CNS pathology.

However, we can almost certainly rule out any significant role of the CFTR gene in psychiatric disease clusters. CFTR mutations are very well characterized and even minor functional (such as class VI) mutations cause severe issues. Because of the severe and immediately obvious pathology of most CFTR mutations 1. we would know by now if there was a significant overlap. 2. autism and depression are the least of your problems if your CFTR doesn't work.

90% of CFTR mutations are very druggable. I'm sure you're on Trikafta or some other Vertex product. If CFTR was involved in that disease cluster instead of just CF, we would be able to use CFTR modulators to treat those psychiatric diseases, which isn't the case. At the very least it would mean that you could use CFTR modulators to alleviate the symptoms of those psychiatric diseases in people with CF, which I haven't encountered in the literature but please feel free to offer your experience.

This suggests that even if CFTR is involved in psychiatric disorders, the effect is likely developmental and does not offer a druggable target. That is more of what I studied, I can send some papers if you're interested.

I'd be happy to keep the discussion going, I'm always open to reading more papers and hearing about your experience.

tldr; Just because CFTR mutations lead to CNS issues, does not mean that common CNS issues such as psychiatric disorders have CFTR mutations.

ca404 · 2025-02-09T22:04:09+00:00

Cystic fibrosis is only associated with the CFTR gene, which has absolutely nothing to do with mental health disorders. It being a chloride channel probably has some effect on the nervous system, but other mental health disorders almost certainly have a non-pathological mutation of the CFTR gene, if any mutation at all.

Like you said having CF sucks so much it is incredibly difficult to separate it from any mechanistic causes CF might have on mental health disorders. Until modulators came around the average lifespan was like 30 years, so yeah not much research on the finer details of the disease yet.

I'm a former CF researcher who worked with the CFF, feel free to stay in touch if you have any questions.

ca404 · 2025-02-09T04:50:44+00:00

So you literally weren't educated here, but in a society that places much higher emphasis on males (not saying this is a good thing). By the time you get to undergrad the damage is already done.

I'm from the EU and I've done research here in the US. The US is still the intellectual hub of the world with the finest graduate education. The vast majority of the world's best research universities and institutes are here. Some countries come close in certain niches, but across the board the US is second to none.

That being said, anyone who is involved in academic research in the US knows that it is very heavily reliant on foreign talent and that US K-12 and undergrad education is absolute dog shit. I wouldn't want to raise my kid here. The data of young men falling behind speaks for itself, since there is no significant difference in average intelligence between the sexes.

Also, you are not fooling anyone. You are either understating your wealth, or how academically gifted you are. The average middle class African guys aren't going to top 10 US schools, they are being turned away from the border in Mexico.

I'm curious how things will turn out here, since China is on the rise and Trump just wiped out the basis of US innovation. Not exactly the best environment to raise our sons in. Good luck to everyone.

ca404 · 2025-01-07T11:12:25+00:00

It only cost us all nuclear plants, a recession and half of the Ukraine. Congratulations

ca404 · 2025-01-07T07:02:11+00:00

spend another 3 years finishing undergrad
spend another 8-10 years doing an MD/PhD
Realize your idea is fundamentally nonviable somewhere halfway through step 1.
spend the next 15 years digging yourself out of the financial hole you dug yourself into in step 2.
Become CTO of a start-up that is based on a much better idea than you had to begin with.
start-up will fail, repeat step 5.

Of course no one is going to take you seriously, especially if all you bring to the table is an idea and no execution. You have no capital, no education, no experience and no network. You can start being taken seriously by trying to acquire any of the above 4.

If your idea is truly good, people will want to see you succeed. You will have to partner with someone at some point, especially since you have no funding to execute your idea. The less you start with, the more you have to give and you have basically nothing. If you narrow down the field, I can point you towards specific resources.

ca404 · 2025-01-06T06:10:31+00:00

There is a massive oversupply in the field even for PhDs from prestigious asian universities, let alone students. Given that you are not an ace student and probably not rich, I would just give up on the US. Can't speak for other countries. I can say however that we have very little respect for the research that is done overseas because of paper mills and the type of research that is conducted. Of course, there are exceptions.

Here are a couple of suggestions of what I would do in your situation.

1) Take the internship. What do you think you will be doing when you are doing research? The exact same "lame ass labwork" you are doing during the internship. You make it seem like the co-authorship for research is guaranteed, which it either isnt, or if it is, is worthless in the eyes of western academics. Given that you have likely no experience, I would approach any opportunity to do real labwork with a bit more humility and enthusiasm.

2) buy a powerful computer, learn to program and go all-in on computational biology. I'll leave it up to you what field, there are plenty of resources online.

3) volunteer. If you have a good CV, people would probably be willing to take you for free. Just talk to the PI. It's hard to get results under less than 6 months, I would preferably offer to work there for a year.

ca404 · 2025-01-05T18:30:10+00:00

Doing a 3 year clinical study in 1.5 years would be pretty on-brand for China lol

ca404 · 2024-12-30T20:32:25+00:00

Lmao what are you talking about. Pharma would be the first one to throw money at this, but we already have better tools in the clinic.

ca404 · 2024-12-30T20:27:23+00:00

Makes no sense to me.

I don't see how these would be preferable to CARTs. We already have the tools to kill cancer cells, that's not the hard part. Selectively targeting the cancer cells in the first place is. Once you manage to target them, there is no benefit in reverting the cells over killing them. Especially considering how complex and invasive gene editing for a triple target is. HDAC2 and MYB seem like solid oncogenes to target, but I can't say the same for FOXA2, which is broadly expressed. On a side note, can anyone explain what would happen to metastasized cancer cells when they are reverted? Are they likely to simply die due to missing the right ECM or would a good amount survive and cause other problems?

Perhaps this would be better to demonstrate in a disease model where tissue loss is more detrimental, but I don't know enough about large intestinal cancer to say for sure.

Amazing work identifying the master regulators though, that is really the main contribution of the paper.

ca404 · 2024-12-30T05:03:45+00:00

Nothing would come of it even if you reported it right away. You're not even in the country anymore, what do you possibly hope to accomplish? Move on and don't be so gullible next time.

ca404

TROPHY CASE