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I'm amazed at how much we still don't know about our human body. Engineering in other areas, like computer sciences, is much easier because we understand the fu
by karimf 8y ago
I'm amazed at how much we still don't know about our human body. Engineering in other areas, like computer sciences, is much easier because we understand the fundamental concept behind it. But in bioengineering or pharmacy, a lot of them are trial and error, and serendipity, because I think we simply don't really understand how the cell actually work in details yet. [0]
[0] One discussion about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16079735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16079735
- adrianN 8y agoIt would be easier if cells had an intelligent designer and weren't just soups of chemicals that interact in millions of ways.
- elboru 8y ago* It would be easier if cells had a human designer, with not so many chemicals interacting and in fewer ways.
- gowld 8y agoLooking at my job's code base, I'm not sure that would help.
- shagie 8y agoI am reminded of an old Usenet post... proof of the existence of the System Administrator. https://everything2.com/title/Existence+of+the+System+Administrator https://everything2.com/title/Existence+of+the+System+Admini... is the copy I can find on google. From the argument from design: > One looks at a simple computer, and sees evidence of intelligent design. > One looks at a Sun Sparc 20 and... um... well... Okay, One looks at a DEC Alpha and sees evidence of intelligent design. And from the counter argument: > If you think the network implies intelligent design, you haven't seen our network.
- aurailious 8y agoWith the amount of abstraction going on in software its going to be much more like soup in the future.
- charlchi 8y agoAlso, we can't zap lazers at living cells to see what their doing because it kills them, so actually making the discoveries is challenging.
- carapace 8y agoAhem, Optogenetics > Optogenetics is a biological technique which involves the use of light to control cells in living tissue, typically neurons, that have been genetically modified to express light-sensitive ion channels. It is a neuromodulation method that uses a combination of techniques from optics and genetics to control and monitor the activities of individual neurons in living tissue—even within freely-moving animals—and to precisely measure these manipulation effects in real-time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics
- Balgair 8y agoTo be fair, you have to be very careful with the power of the laser as you can easily fry what you are looking at.
- charlchi 8y agoExactly. I think he was missing my point: Cells and biological structures of that size have always been easy to look at, it's not so easy to do the same with smaller structures, like DNA.
- Balgair 8y agoYeah, with DNA, you literally have to x-ray it to 'see' anything. That tends to be rather destructive. And as science goes along, we are seeing that the smaller stuff is really really important, like scaffolding proteins in synapses.
- Feuilles_Mortes 8y agoActually we do this in the lab I work in. Look up laser ablation of neurons in C. elegans.
- Balgair 8y agoI came from physics into bio. I was one of those arrogant physicists that though the bio majors were just not 'smart' enough and couldn't hack it in math, so they fell into bio. Maybe that was true of some of my fellow students, but as a field, bio is just insane. I was terribly wrong to think those things. Bio is crazy complex. We've been poking the brain for a century now, and we have basically gotten no-where. At least we know that now. Take astrocytes/glia as a tiny example. These are the 'glue' cells in a brain that hold and feed the neurons. Sure, they do that, but a lot of new research is saying that they help modulate the synapse as well, the fundamental thing that makes thinking happen. Maybe. We basically have no idea now. We can't even say how many astrocytes there are in a typical brain. Is it 50%, is it 10%? Each new study overturns the last. It's chaos. What even is a synapse? We have no idea. Multiply this over every tissue in a body. And then that's only humans, let alone turtles and birds and bacteria and viruses etc. One must always remember that bio was 'designed' by a very drunk, very horny, illiterate schizophrenic over 4.5 billion years with an average design cycle of about 22 minutes (~10E14 total cycles). It makes no sense because it never did.