Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

1. Yes, but the idea would be that if you provide a way to communicate the variables that actually matter for consistency then you can increase the robustness of a finding. If you have one lab that can _always_ produce a result, but no one else can, then clearly we do not really understand what is going on and one might not even be willing to call the result scientific.

2. Maybe not better, but certainly more result oriented. Core facilities do exist right now for things like viral vectors and microscopy (often because you do need levels of technical expertise that are simply not affordable in single labs). If there were a way to communicate how to do experiments more formally then the core facilities could expand to cover a much wider array of experiment types. You still have to worry about robustness, but if you have multiple 'core' facilities that can execute any experiment then that issue goes away as well. The hope of course is that individual labs as they exist today (perhaps with an additional computational tint) would be able to actually replicate each other's result, because we will probably end up needing nearly as many 'core' facilities as we have labs right now, simply because the diversity of phenomena that we need to study in biology is so high.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: