Hemodynamic Software, Project nGene.org^®

Believing in an appointed calling, hoping to help others.

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

RCT Meta-analysis: Robotic vs. Laparoscopic Surgery — Roh et al., 2017 · DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0191628

Pulmonary resection for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis - Roh et al., 2017 · DOI: 10.1093/ejcts/ezx209

Pixel-Level semi-automatization of Parmar's methodology

A decade of admiration and benchmarking built upon the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database  and the  Heart Sound and Murmur Library

This study is hoped to serve as a cornerstone for the following establishment:

St. Lazarus Translational Research Hospital
nGene Hemodynamic Research Center
Powered by Project nGene.org

Cornerstone laid on Nov 4th, 2025

Hierarchical analysis of multidrug-resistant organism clearance and asymmetric co-colonization in a long-term care facility - Roh et al., 2025 · DOI: 10.1016/j.jiph.2025.103017

Epilogue to a gathering winter

1. A long economic winter

   The flurries that began with the 2018 tariff spiral have hardened into a genuine economic ice age. The echo of the 1930 Smoot–Hawley Act—ten years of depression followed by six years of war—has lengthened, as renewed tariff escalation collides with record leverage, speculative excess, and an inverted demographic pyramid. Even the fifteen-year recovery that followed Smoot–Hawley may prove optimistic; the present contraction plausibly extends across decades.

2. Strategy under constraint

   As argued in Genesis—Chapter 8: Strategy, the appropriate response is not radical self-editing but disciplined co-evolution. The priority is to strengthen core systems rather than endlessly reshuffling teams, while preserving a baseline of human dignity and agency as the boundary between person and program blurs. The mandate is necessarily balanced: augment human capability enough to remain competitive, yet constrain machine power within a moral and operational frame. This balance cannot be fixed in advance; it requires a continuously revised understanding of what must remain human as code evolves.

3. The Net Terminal Gene

   The central risk is not a dramatic machine revolt but quiet deskilling. When societies become fluent in outputs yet illiterate in mechanisms, tacit knowledge erodes and systemic failures go unseen until they are catastrophic. The allegory of the Net Terminal Gene captures this danger: relinquishing the capacity to directly understand, intervene in, and reconstitute infrastructure. Co-evolution with machines remains viable only while human agency retains sufficient depth to supervise, override, and redesign automated systems. Manual oversight, therefore, is not nostalgia but necessity.

4. Puppet mastery

   What persists in the cold is curiosity—the refusal to stop asking “What if?”—and creativity, the recombination of ideas beyond any predefined routine. Alongside these stands puppet mastery, understood not as manipulation but as technical stewardship. In the present era, a single engineer coordinating multiple AI and robotic agents through deep code literacy is no longer exceptional but natural. Such coordination may be read metaphorically as a transformation of human time and space complexity: not in the formal sense of computation theory, but in practical effect, where the cognitive and operational reach of one engineer expands dramatically.

5. Harnessing Brooks’s Mythical Man-Month

   Under such conditions, the lesson of The Mythical Man-Month becomes not merely relevant but structurally attainable. When a single engineer retains the Net Terminal Gene—the capacity for direct system-level understanding— and exercises puppet mastery over multiple AI agents, the classic constraints identified by Brooks are partially dissolved. Productivity still does not scale linearly with headcount; instead, it scales with architectural clarity and disciplined coordination. By conducting many agents as a unified system, individual effort is compressed, parallelized, and amplified, reducing coordination overhead to a human-manageable scale. In this configuration, the limiting factor shifts decisively away from manpower toward understanding, making outcomes once reserved for entire teams achievable under the stewardship of a single, system-literate engineer.

6. Grace in the machine

   “A man can receive nothing except it be given him from heaven” (John 3:27). Seen in this light, artificial intelligence appears less as a rival than as a provision. Perhaps AI itself is such a gift, multiplying the loaves of curiosity and the fishes of creativity. The gift, however, is not the machine itself, but the opportunity it affords: to act with greater coherence, to think with greater reach, and to realize long-held designs through disciplined stewardship. When deliberately oriented toward this end, such software becomes a means of return rather than accumulation—an instrument through which human agency may be extended to love, to restore, and to contribute, however modestly, to the good of humanity even through a long winter.