Essential Cell Biology

What Hacker News says

1. wrycoderJun 2022
   Alberts et al. Essential Cell Biology is a bit less advanced, but I'm finding it very complete, just not quite so exhaustive (pun intended). It's still 700 pages, so you'll get your money's worth (if you buy a used copy).
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2. sytelusDec 2018
   Essential Cell Biology is pretty good one to start (Ch 2-7): https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Cell-Biology-Bruce-Alberts/.... There are numerous books like Machinery of Life that don't go in to enough details. Most books specifically on subject of protein structure, dynamics and folding are advanced textbooks like Introduction to Protein Structure by Branden and Tooze. My experience has been that following all the details is very difficult without taking formal classes in these subjects and there is an immense amount of details that is probably not relevant to our purpose of computational prediction. Hope is that someone soon writes Protein Folding for Programmers :).
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3. biolurker1Aug 2019
   By trade I am a web developer and have worked a lot both in the backend and with different databases. My math is very rusty from high school (because as you may know, there is no math in "soft" software development any more which always surprises my friends when they ask). I remember almost zero about how cells work from school.

   I was trying to forget this part, but I am 39 now.

   There is a very nice Masters program where I live in Europe that is about Bioinformatics, I contacted the co-ordinator and said I could get in if I refresh my Math and Biology with a few books about linear algebra and the book "Essential Cell Biology".

   So here is the thing. It would take me this year to prepare myself at my own pace for induction and study these. Next year I would start the 2 year Masters and I will graduate when I am 42.

   I would like to either do a Phd or work in a research environment where as someone put it here on Reddit and it stuck with me "I would much prefer analyzing vast datasets of cancer causing molecules than datasets of user behavior to make the company monetize a product".

   Questions:

   1) Am I too old to be accepted in jobs and research environments after I finish the Masters

   2) Is age-related cognitive decline an issue that you think might affect me? I couldn't find many examples of people switched to something very intellectually demanding with no experience later in IT (most of my colleagues are now project managers something that uses crystallized (learned) intelligence and experience rather than sheer processing speed & memory)

   3) Will I be able to actually contribute or with my age I will probably end up cleaning excel sheet data? I want to contribute meaningfully

   Please be blunt, I am about to spend 3 years of my life in this.

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4. ghshephardJun 2011
   In the 1930s to 1950s, anything starchy was bad for you (Ask your grandmother) - In the 1950s - 1980s fat became the new evil. Then it was cholesterol, and saturated Fats. Then Transfatty Acids. For a small period of time there was a niche rebellion against all things carbs, and now it looks like we're coming back against refined sugars (or all things refined white)

   After reading a bit of anti-carb propaganda (Taubes) and being drawn into the "Wow, there are really bad things that you can eat" worldview - I decided to educate myself, and wget downloaded about 16,000 journal articles from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (They let you do this for $25, with the only request being that you put a 3 second delay between requests. Some awk/sed skills required to parse out the URLs, but not much. Totally download time was 39 hours)

   After reading through 40 or 50 of those articles on topics like "metabolism", "glycolysis", "diabetes", (btw - can anyone recommend a good PDF index tool - Lucene is really not easy to plug/play install - I ended up using recursive grep -il on the pdftotext versions to track down docs (very 1993) - but surely someone has solved the problem of indexing 16,000 PDFs in a directory - google fu did not yield much, surprisingly) - I realized that I needed to pick up more education.

   Two books I'm making my way through:

     o Essential Cell Biology, Second Edition - $7+shipping.[1]
     o Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry, Fourth Edition - $14+Shipping. [2]
    

   Plus, the one I really, really want - but used 2004 editions are insanely expensive, and there has been a lot of useful developments in nutrition and metabolism since 1999

     o Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism [3]
   

   Thank goodness for a generous "Amazon.com Look Inside" allowance - I've probably spent about 10+ Hours perusing this book.

   My takeaway, after admittedly putting only three or four months into this topic, is the following:

     o Very little has been donein the way of double-blinded,
       placebo controlled, rigorous nutrition studies.
   
     o The few that _have_ done these studies, have usually 
       come in with an agenda (Low Fat, Low Cholesterol, Low
       Carb).
   
     o For how important this whole field is, it's amazing 
       that we've invested so little.
   

   So yes - most cereal (the exception potentially being anything your Paleo ancestors would have recognized as cereal) is probably bad for you. I'll go farther than the OP and say you're probably kidding yourself if you think that "Corn Flakes" or "Crispy Crunch" is significantly better than "Fruit Loops" - it might be marginally better, but none of the refined stuff is doing great things for the western metabolism.

   [1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/081533480X

   [2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0716743396

   [3] http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Nutrition-Metabolism-Sareen-G...

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