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
#2/2 "Puppet Master” with “Net Terminal Gene”: Epilogue in a Gathering Winter (written on April 21, 2025)
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A Long Economic Winter
“Winter is coming,” House Stark once warned, and the flurries that began with the 2018 tariff spiral have settled into a true ice age. The echo of the 1930 Smoot–Hawley Act—ten years of depression followed by six of war—has lengthened: a second wave of “Trump tariffs” in 2025 now collides with record leverage, frothy speculation, and an inverted demographic pyramid. Even the fifteen-year ordeal that followed Smoot–Hawley may prove an optimistic compass; today’s contraction could endure several decades.
Yet decline need not mean dissolution. Beneath the frozen ground seeds are hardening. Industries rarely die; they molt—shedding obsolete skins, recomposing ownership, and re-wiring supply chains at wartime speed. A generation from now, archaeologists of capital will trace most “overnight revolutions” back to this bleak season. -
Genesis—Chapter 8: The Covenant of Intelligence
(after Dr. Eric Schmidt’s Genesis, Chapter 8)
- Scale as Birthright — A single multimodal model digests global jurisprudence before lunch; a local fine-tuned cousin speaks dialectal Hausa by dinner. Scope, once rationed over lifetimes, now arrives ready-minted—the way oxygen greets a newborn.
- The Fifth Instinct — Beyond fight, flight, flock, and forge, Schmidt posits “forecast” as humanity’s emerging instinct—our compulsion to simulate futures. Large models externalize that instinct: they forecast market cascades, viral pathways, even their own fine-tuning gradients.
- Exponential Humility — Chapter 8’s warning echoes Brooks’s admonition: manpower multiplies communication paths; model-power multiplies unknown unknowns. The covenant therefore binds us to humility in the face of expanding error surfaces. AI accelerates; governance must accelerate faster.
Thus, in the deep freeze, AI is neither merciful deity nor existential foe—it is the flood-water itself, demanding new arks, new measurements of meaning, and a vow never to outsource first principles to the very torrents meant to carry us.
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The Peril of Losing the “Net Terminal Gene”
The anime Bleach imagined a society so confident in automation that it relinquished its Net Terminal Gene—the capacity to commune with infrastructure. Each competence we assign to silicon trades away tacit knowledge; the risk is not a robot uprising but a quiet, pervasive deskilling. A cohort fluent in prompts yet illiterate in mechanism becomes blind to systemic fault lines. The covenant of Chapter 8 thus doubles as a plea: keep enough fingers on the dials to discern when the autopilot lies.
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What Endures in the Cold
Asset Why Tariff- & Model-Proof Curiosity An obstinate habit of asking “What happens if…?” that prevents any winter from ossifying into dogma. Creativity The juxtaposition of parts no manual files adjacent—still germinating first inside a human cranium. Puppet Mastery (Integration Mastery) Ghost in the Shell’s Puppet Master was a self-aware aggregation of lost fragments, orchestrating networks it did not physically own. Likewise, the modern software architect conducts human, artificial, and cyber-physical intelligences into a single, soaring fugue. Deep code literacy lets the architect pull the strings—collapsing inter-communication complexity, boosting each contributor’s leverage, and wielding the Net Terminal Gene to keep the strings from tangling into a Gordian knot. Having these three assets can ignite explosive productivity, effectively lengthening the working lifespan of a software architect and enabling one to accomplish far more within a single lifetime.
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The Final Bulwark: Debugging
Debugging shoulders its own immortality clause. Alan Turing’s 1936 proof of the Halting Problem demonstrated that no universal algorithm can decide, for every possible program, whether it will halt. In formal terms, the complement of the halting set is not Turing-recognizable, making a truly universal debugger mathematically impossible. As a result, the human capacity to sense discontinuity—the smell of a knot tied wrong—remains irreplaceable.
Debugging, then, is less about patch-hunting than about peeling abstraction until reality blushes through. Even self-repairing swarms of models inherit undecidable edges and opaque emergent behaviours. The forbidden yet essential question—“Why did you choose that edge case?”—must still be asked by flesh-and-blood skeptics. In the crevices where logic proofs cannot tread, human intuition holds the line, preserving a niche that no machine can close.
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A New Software Architecture Vow
With humility, the following provisional vow is offered—subject, always, to revision as wiser minds improve upon it:
Perhaps a single Puppet Master can best confront the winter:
- Resist the reflex to mirror every new challenge with additional headcount.
- Constrain communication lines to graphs the human mind can still steward, guiding AI- and robot-powered labor with patient oversight.
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Stewardship in Multiplicity
The role therefore mutates: from project manager to computational integrator, balancing not merely tasks but entangled timelines, trust graphs, and ontological mismatches among distributed artificial agents. Others will craft vows tuned to their callings; this one claims only a single stewardship, offered in humility—and in the certainty that someone must hold the master key.
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Grace in the Machine
“A man can receive nothing except it be given him from heaven” (John 3 : 27). Perhaps AI itself is such a gift, multiplying the loaves of curiosity and the fishes of creativity. Discipline lies in preventing the basket from becoming idol, and in preparing future custodians to understand its weave—lest the Puppet Master’s strings fray, and winter’s hush become a permanent silence.
