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The human body (and biology more generally) is fractal-like in its complexity. One day we may be able to model things accurately enough to not require experimen

The human body (and biology more generally) is fractal-like in its complexity. One day we may be able to model things accurately enough to not require experimental work, but probably not in our lifetime.

billfruit 7y ago
Knowledgeable medical scientists should be able to explain the effects of vaping as a physiological process, axiomatically. Are we saying our medical scientists do not want to attempt that?
- matt4077 7y ago
  "Vapours" actually were a major thing in medical research once, cured by bloodletting and mercury IIRC. There are all sort of models still widely believed today. Some are unassailable (evolution, germ theory), some seem right more often than not ("don't eat bacon"), and some seem so right but nothing based on them works ("cholesterol is bad"). So this sort of naive belief in our ability to model the processes in a body or a cell has out of fashion at least since WW2. It's still used to come up with ideas to try. But even there, purely random exploration of the search space is not consistently worse.
cannonedhamster 7y ago
Modelling the basics of a human lung isn't all that difficult. You can see the effects of vaping on an enclosed space just by having the smoke pulled into an enclosed space like they used to do for cigarettes. That would give you substances created though the vaping process and likely to stick in the lungs. Longer term effects are drastically harder obviously as it doesn't take into account the cleaning mechanisms in the lungs but for basic verification that something is toxic that's not a difficult bridge to cross. Now when you get into whole body or things with mutations such as cancer I agree with you while heartedly. While we can understand in a petri dish how to kill something in a human you've got to worry about things like delivery, hidden single cells, toxicity, and drug proliferation all of which can be different in every single person with a cancer. In biotech we're still just barely out of the dark ages. To bring this to the original topic, we're still in the dark ages with fields like economics. While we understand many of levers that exist we have little idea of how and when to effectively pull them.
- grandmczeb 7y ago
  Models are useful tools, but at the end of the day you’re not going to get a conclusive answer to a question like “what are the impacts of vaping on human health?” without looking at a real life human. At least at current levels of scientific understanding, being able to plug a chemical into an equation and pop out a complete description of the effects (my interpretation of what the gp is asking for) is a bit of a pipe dream.

billfruit 7y ago

Knowledgeable medical scientists should be able to explain the effects of vaping as a physiological process, axiomatically. Are we saying our medical scientists do not want to attempt that?

matt4077 7y ago
"Vapours" actually were a major thing in medical research once, cured by bloodletting and mercury IIRC. There are all sort of models still widely believed today. Some are unassailable (evolution, germ theory), some seem right more often than not ("don't eat bacon"), and some seem so right but nothing based on them works ("cholesterol is bad"). So this sort of naive belief in our ability to model the processes in a body or a cell has out of fashion at least since WW2. It's still used to come up with ideas to try. But even there, purely random exploration of the search space is not consistently worse.

cannonedhamster 7y ago

Modelling the basics of a human lung isn't all that difficult. You can see the effects of vaping on an enclosed space just by having the smoke pulled into an enclosed space like they used to do for cigarettes. That would give you substances created though the vaping process and likely to stick in the lungs. Longer term effects are drastically harder obviously as it doesn't take into account the cleaning mechanisms in the lungs but for basic verification that something is toxic that's not a difficult bridge to cross. Now when you get into whole body or things with mutations such as cancer I agree with you while heartedly. While we can understand in a petri dish how to kill something in a human you've got to worry about things like delivery, hidden single cells, toxicity, and drug proliferation all of which can be different in every single person with a cancer. In biotech we're still just barely out of the dark ages. To bring this to the original topic, we're still in the dark ages with fields like economics. While we understand many of levers that exist we have little idea of how and when to effectively pull them.

grandmczeb 7y ago
Models are useful tools, but at the end of the day you’re not going to get a conclusive answer to a question like “what are the impacts of vaping on human health?” without looking at a real life human. At least at current levels of scientific understanding, being able to plug a chemical into an equation and pop out a complete description of the effects (my interpretation of what the gp is asking for) is a bit of a pipe dream.