Hemodynamic Software, Project nGene.org®
Hyunsuk Frank Roh, MD: Echocardiographer & IRB Chair
#1/2 The Mythical Man-Month: Prologue of my Life Ahead (written in 2013)
Throughout an entire undergraduate semester in 2006, Professor Elliot Soloway repeatedly read aloud selections from the book, The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks. The particularly memorable quote from the book about being a software architect read as follows: "The man-month as a unit of measuring the size of a job is a dangerous and deceptive myth." In other words, if the software architect decides to increase the manpower in order to decrease the month required for the software development, it is likely to, rather, deteriorate the project by increasing the intercommunication complexity. Fortunately, this principle, highlighted by Soloway, resonated with me based on my past experiences.
Professor Robert Denver provided me with an excellent opportunity to learn basic molecular biology lab techniques. He assigned me the task of sequencing a gene from Xenopus tropicalis using Vector NTI software. This introduction to bioinformatics was pivotal, propelling me towards further interdisciplinary research in computer science and biology. Later, I serendipitously attended "Computational Biology Short Courses" in August 2004, where I was introduced to a broad range of computational biology topics by various instructors, including Professor David States, the developer of BLASTX. The BLAST algorithm captivated me and has profoundly influenced me ever since, as demonstrated by my BLASTed logo.
nGene, along with "enGine" and "&Gene," shares a similar pronunciation, and these terms can be visually aligned and color-coded, reminiscent of how DNA or protein sequences are presented in Vector NTI software.
Professor Jignesh Patel gracefully allowed me to attend his weekly Bioinformatics seminar and assigned me a programming project to evaluate phylogenetic tree-generating algorithms. There, I realized that, in an interdisciplinary field, there could not be enough emphasis on communication between Apple and Orange in order to be on the same page; in this sense, being a chimera myself, trained in both fields, I can help (1) by not doubling the number of "men" required and (2) by reducing the "intercommunication complexity" on a manageable level. During the past seven years, there were many tears and changes in my life... And yet, I can still feel my heart pumping with joyful anticipation about working on the interdisciplinary topic because of my belief that someday I will hopefully make an important contribution to this interdisciplinary field that had once seized me with the BLASTed heart.
- Written during my 2013 trip to British Columbia/California
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A Long Economic Winter
“Winter is coming,” House Stark’s warning in Game of Thrones, once sounded rhetorical. The tariff escalations that began in 2018—eerily recalling the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act of 1930—proved less a passing squall than the first snowflakes of a protracted storm. Smoot–Hawley ushered in roughly ten years of depression and was followed by six years of global war; a comparable rhythm now repeats. In 2025 a fresh wave of “Trump tariffs” deepens protectionism, while record leverage, speculative excess, and demographic inversion thicken the frost. These structural burdens suggest that even the fifteen‑year ordeal that trailed Smoot–Hawley may be insufficient precedent; the present contraction is poised to stretch well beyond a couple of decades.
Yet decline need not equate to ruin. In this inevitable, abrupt but prolonged winter, unseen beneath the surface, seeds of change are taking root, preparing for the next generation. Processes, ownership structures, and entire sectors are being recomposed at wartime speed: industries do not vanish so much as shed skin in a violent generational transformation.
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AI: Friend, Foe, Familiar
Into this frost advances artificial intelligence, a prodigy that has consumed every law library, tax code, and pharmacopoeia while humanity slept. One multimodal model drafts patent claims more deftly than a junior attorney, reconciles ledgers with monastic patience, and outlines treatment plans rivaling seasoned clinicians. On factory floors, robot swarms guided by self‑healing algorithms pour concrete, weld beams, and ferry parcels with a steadiness no shift‑planner can equal.
Fred Brooks famously argued in The Mythical Man‑Month that adding manpower to a late project only multiplies communication paths and delays delivery. In this light, capacity is not expanded by more people but by more capable tools. A single software architect now harnesses AI and robots to collapse time‑ and space‑complexity—compressing years of analysis into minutes, extending effective human lifespan, increasing spatial efficiency, and confining once‑sprawling problems within the bounds of a processor—an augmentation of human contribution entirely consistent with Brooks’s admonition, enabling entrusted work to outlive biological limits and to traverse jurisdictions once unreachable.
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The Peril of Losing the “Net Terminal Gene”
The anime Bleach envisioned a society that, having abdicated memory and governance to machines, surrendered its Net Terminal Gene—the birth‑right enabling communion with its own infrastructure. A similar risk shadows the present. Each craft surrendered to algorithms trades away a sliver of tacit knowledge. Should an entire cohort place greater trust in black‑box models than in first principles, systemic blind spots emerge. The danger is not rebellion by silicon but a quiet deskilling: a generation fluent in prompts yet illiterate in mechanism.
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What Endures in the Cold
Certain assets remain both tariff‑proof and model‑proof:
- Curiosity — an extensive, restless impulse to ask “What happens if…?” ensuring no winter is deemed permanent and no tool final.
- Creativity — invention rooted in humane learning, able to recombine parts manuals never placed side‑by‑side; AI may extend ideas, yet the surprising question still germinates in the human mind.
- Integration Mastery — the software architect’s gift for orchestrating diverse intelligences — human, artificial, and cyber‑physical — into a unified, high‑velocity engine. Rooted in deep programming and mathematical understanding, it embodies an authority that governs the machine chorus rather than submits to it. This faculty echoes the Net Terminal Gene and is indispensable for explosive productivity: by boosting each contributor’s functional leverage rather than increasing headcount, it collapses inter‑communication complexity and delivers far greater outcomes with a leaner team.
Amid these, an enduring niche warrants explicit naming: debugging. At its deepest, debugging is not mere troubleshooting but the untangling of reality beneath abstraction. AI, however brilliant, remains bounded by Turing’s legacy—most notably the Halting Problem, which renders the set of halting programs non‑recursively enumerable, sometimes called Turing‑unrecognizable. Alan Turing’s proof of the theoretical impossibility of a universal debugger ensures that no algorithm can furnish universal certificates of correctness. Detecting misalignment, posing the forbidden question, sensing a discontinuity—these persist as uniquely human endowments and constitute a final bulwark against unexamined code.
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A New Software Architecture Vow
A hemodynamic‑simulation project once juggled kernel code, survival curves, and antibiotic‑resistance models. Today it must also choreograph LLM agents drafting protocols, micro‑robots fabricating sensors, and cloud pipelines learning in situ. In deference to Brooks’s admonition and out of sober resourcefulness, the following concise vow stands:
Only one software architect need confront the winter:
- by resisting the reflex to double headcount,
- by constraining intercommunication complexity to what reason can steward, guiding AI‑ and robot‑driven contributors with prudent oversight.
The role thus transforms into that of a computational integrator, balancing not only tasks but the compounded complexities of time, space, and trust that arise among distributed artificial agents. Other practitioners will discern paths suited to their own callings; the vow above aspires only to a single stewardship, offered in humility.
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Grace in the Machine
John 3 : 27 whispers, “A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven.” The verse now echoes through silicon circuitry: AI may itself be a gift, multiplying every good thing already in hand. Curiosity, creativity, and integration resemble loaves and fishes; AI is the basket that allows them to nourish multitudes. Discipline lies in preventing the basket from becoming idol and in preparing future custodians to understand its weave.
