My understanding is we got programmable computers in large part because: 1) a bunch of scientific/engineering advances we were in a position to make were bottlenecked by massive amounts of 'boring' calculations 2) Some of those affected areas related to the war effort in critical ways, so lots of money and resources were poured into solving the problem.
Seems like we're in a similar position with '1' above, in connection with genetic engineering, so demand exists to abstract over and automate the boring stuff. But maybe the problem is significantly harder, or maybe we're just lacking the pressure that would lead to focused/cooperative effort and lots of resources pouring in, like we had in '2'.
> lacking the pressure that would lead to focused/cooperative effort and lots of resources pouring in
Until literally a few months ago, hacking at the level of the protein abstraction was relegated to academics. Then Chimeric Antigen Receptors cured children of cancers, and were approved by the FDA. And so in August, Kite got bought by Gilead for $12B. Then in November Gilead bought another class of multi-domain protein biotherapeutics called SynNotch for $0.5B from an 18 month old startup. And Juno got purchased yesterday for $9B again for their work on CARs - multi-domain protein biotherapeutics.
We'd like to think that such cooperative effort and resources are just starting to pour in. But up until very recently, it was not obvious what the commercial value was when working at such an abstraction layer.
That's interesting to know, thanks. Regarding the 'cooperative' aspect, though—acquisitions might be falling a bit short of the ideal imo ;) But maybe it will be enough.
Seems like we're in a similar position with '1' above, in connection with genetic engineering, so demand exists to abstract over and automate the boring stuff. But maybe the problem is significantly harder, or maybe we're just lacking the pressure that would lead to focused/cooperative effort and lots of resources pouring in, like we had in '2'.