Has your friend talked with current bio research students? It’s very common to hear that people are having success writing Python/R/Matlab/bash scripts using these tools when they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.
Possibly this is just among the smallish group of students I know at MIT, but I would be surprised to hear that a biomedical researcher has no use for them.
Recommending that someone in the industry take pointers from how students do their work is always solid advice.
Unironically, yes. The industry clearly has more experience, but it’s silly to assume students don’t have novel and useful ideas that can (and will) be integrated
I'm taking a course on computational health laboratory. I do have to say gemini is helping me a lot, but someone who knows what's happening is going to be much better than us. Our professor told us it is of course allowed to make things with llms, since on the field we will be able to do that. However, I found they're much less precise with bio-informatic libraries than others...
I do have to say that we're just approaching the tip of the iceberg and there are huge issues related to standardization, dirty datas... We still need the supervision and the help of one of the two professors to proceed even with llms
I have general one-shot success asking chatgpt to make bash/python scripts and one-liners where otherwise it would take 1hr to a day to figure out on my own (and I'd use one of my main languages maybe) or I might not even bother trying, which is great for productivity but also over 90% of my job doesn't need throw-away scripts and one-liners.