I don't think humans are going to be able to understand biology. I think our notion of what it means to understand something is going to have to change. We are going to have to be much more comfortable having a complicated model inside a computer, where we only understand part of it.
In some sense , we are extremely lucky with physics. The fact that Maxwell's equations are four linear partial differential equations that explain all this behavior is amazing and magical. There is no reason to expect that these gross bag of fluid that we call our body, which have evolved over 4 billion years, area going to exhibit this kind of aggressive reductionism.
Startup culture teaches you to be like Steve Jobs , in that you are right, and everyone else is wrong, and your vision will power through. Academic culture teaches you that you are dumb and that you are probably wrong because most things never work, nature is hard, and the best you can hope for is working on interesting problems and making a tiny bit of process.
Some of the best scientists out there are the ones who are extremely opportunist-when they see novel ideas and how things suddenly fit together, they drop everything else and work on that for a while. Others are consumed by a single, all-encompassing vision and aggressively pursue that forever. The downside is that the academic funding system really rewards the former.
