3 ms·

What makes you think that (1) that it’s even possible to create such beings, (2) that these would even be good disease models or (3) a lack of model organisms i

by shoyer 6y ago

What makes you think that (1) that it’s even possible to create such beings, (2) that these would even be good disease models or (3) a lack of model organisms is the main factor holding back medical breakthroughs? None of these is at all obvious...

echelon 6y ago
1. It'll be an incredibly difficult engineering task with many large hurdles. But it's possible, because life found its solution in us. We culture human cells all the time, just like bacteria or plants - this is just a higher structure. In fact, you can think of this entire process like growing humans as plants. 2. We spend a lot of time "humanizing" model organisms by creating chimeras. But even then the results are frequently not portable. How many animal studies fail to make the jump to advanced clinical trials? 3. A human is the system you want to study. It has the same genome, the same transcriptome, the same proteome, the same metabolome, and the same kinetics and thermodynamics. Animal models are 17th century dentistry in comparison.
- strogonoff 6y ago
  Placebo research and documented cases of physiological diseases treated via mental health therapy puts in question the viability of using theoretical human-like creatures that possess no consciousness, and therefore no mental state to speak of. To draw an analogy, this would introduce such a huge gap between “staging” and “prod” environments that the effort and the ethical risk of ending up with “staging” entities possessing any degree of human consciousness cannot even remotely be worth it. (I’m somewhat alarmed that I feel the need to spell that out.)
  - echelon 6y ago
    > Placebo research and documented cases of physiological diseases treated via mental health therapy How is cancer something you can fix with mental health therapy? Tell them to go home and feel better, that it'll all be over soon? What about a host of other genetic and immune disorders, many of which can be fatal? I don't mean to come across as harsh or mocking, but there are a host of diseases where your solution does not work. > I’m somewhat alarmed that I feel the need to spell that out I understand your argument, but I reject it because I don't think we're seeing the same picture of where things now stand or could be. I'll counter with an analogy of my own. Right now we're attempting to fix issues in prod by looking at another company's software, decompiling it, bit fiddling a bit, then trying to hot patch it into our own production instance. We run some smoke tests before releasing things, but these can't always identify long-term effects. I want to have an actual honest to god dev and staging environment. Not just that, but a system that looks remarkably like prod that we can burn down and spin up on demand for each investigator trying to solve novel problems. We can actually test at scale (and duration!) and pick apart the system to see that no part of it goes into failure mode or disease state. Development goes much faster when you have an actual dev kit to run your code on or tear apart. We don't have anything like that right now. I get that the notion that human beings being equated to fungible software or disposable hunks of meat is uncomfortable. But the special ingredient in both you and me is consciousness, and this design ensures we never bring new consciousness to life. We turn off the gene expression that causes the brain to develop, and we can double down with mechanical amputation. It sounds macabre, but so too did dissecting cadavers a century ago.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - goblin89 6y ago
      > Right now we're attempting to fix issues in prod by looking at another company's software, decompiling it, bit fiddling a bit, then trying to hot patch it into our own production instance. The staging/prod analogy is flawed. What we are doing is manipulating board wiring, while what we could do is further our understanding of and abilities to alter the OS and firmware running on it. Very unfortunately, but understandably, scientifically oriented mindset tends to dismiss the latter route. After all, so far it seemingly rules out any notion of dev environment. Where is reproducibility, if all we can do is SSH into a snowflake live system (or more like XSS inject it, right)? A daunting limitation, but perhaps not impossible to overcome. That is not to say the former has no place and your point is invalid. Still, when all you have is a hammer…
      - echelon 6y ago
        > The staging/prod analogy is flawed. I agree. Thanks for providing a better one. > Where is reproducibility, if all we can do is SSH into a snowflake live system That's the beauty of this, though. You'd have monoclonal lines of decephalized humans. They're not snowflakes. You'd have knockout lines for studying specific genes, ABO- lines for a blood supply, lines for all the major MHC/HLA for transplants... If you have twenty identical deceph human clones, you can run your same experiment in duplicate and push for statistically meaningful results. Over time we'd aim to reduce the costs of the bodies so that they are cheap to expend in individual experiments. That's when it becomes incredibly powerful, when the average researcher can afford these in their budget. We might learn to control the rate of development. Quickly grow them in a way that doesn't interfere with the experimental results.
        goblin89 6y ago
        > That's the beauty of this, though. You'd have monoclonal lines of decephalized humans. They're not snowflakes. Your approach does not duplicate the OS, only hardware wiring. Again, not to say fiddling with condensers and transistors can’t fix a misbehaving program, but it’s not always the best way to address the issue with fewest side-effects.

by shoyer 6y ago

echelon 6y ago

1. It'll be an incredibly difficult engineering task with many large hurdles. But it's possible, because life found its solution in us. We culture human cells all the time, just like bacteria or plants - this is just a higher structure. In fact, you can think of this entire process like growing humans as plants. 2. We spend a lot of time "humanizing" model organisms by creating chimeras. But even then the results are frequently not portable. How many animal studies fail to make the jump to advanced clinical trials? 3. A human is the system you want to study. It has the same genome, the same transcriptome, the same proteome, the same metabolome, and the same kinetics and thermodynamics. Animal models are 17th century dentistry in comparison.

strogonoff 6y ago
Placebo research and documented cases of physiological diseases treated via mental health therapy puts in question the viability of using theoretical human-like creatures that possess no consciousness, and therefore no mental state to speak of. To draw an analogy, this would introduce such a huge gap between “staging” and “prod” environments that the effort and the ethical risk of ending up with “staging” entities possessing any degree of human consciousness cannot even remotely be worth it. (I’m somewhat alarmed that I feel the need to spell that out.)
- echelon 6y ago
  > Placebo research and documented cases of physiological diseases treated via mental health therapy How is cancer something you can fix with mental health therapy? Tell them to go home and feel better, that it'll all be over soon? What about a host of other genetic and immune disorders, many of which can be fatal? I don't mean to come across as harsh or mocking, but there are a host of diseases where your solution does not work. > I’m somewhat alarmed that I feel the need to spell that out I understand your argument, but I reject it because I don't think we're seeing the same picture of where things now stand or could be. I'll counter with an analogy of my own. Right now we're attempting to fix issues in prod by looking at another company's software, decompiling it, bit fiddling a bit, then trying to hot patch it into our own production instance. We run some smoke tests before releasing things, but these can't always identify long-term effects. I want to have an actual honest to god dev and staging environment. Not just that, but a system that looks remarkably like prod that we can burn down and spin up on demand for each investigator trying to solve novel problems. We can actually test at scale (and duration!) and pick apart the system to see that no part of it goes into failure mode or disease state. Development goes much faster when you have an actual dev kit to run your code on or tear apart. We don't have anything like that right now. I get that the notion that human beings being equated to fungible software or disposable hunks of meat is uncomfortable. But the special ingredient in both you and me is consciousness, and this design ensures we never bring new consciousness to life. We turn off the gene expression that causes the brain to develop, and we can double down with mechanical amputation. It sounds macabre, but so too did dissecting cadavers a century ago.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - goblin89 6y ago
    > Right now we're attempting to fix issues in prod by looking at another company's software, decompiling it, bit fiddling a bit, then trying to hot patch it into our own production instance. The staging/prod analogy is flawed. What we are doing is manipulating board wiring, while what we could do is further our understanding of and abilities to alter the OS and firmware running on it. Very unfortunately, but understandably, scientifically oriented mindset tends to dismiss the latter route. After all, so far it seemingly rules out any notion of dev environment. Where is reproducibility, if all we can do is SSH into a snowflake live system (or more like XSS inject it, right)? A daunting limitation, but perhaps not impossible to overcome. That is not to say the former has no place and your point is invalid. Still, when all you have is a hammer…
    - echelon 6y ago
      > The staging/prod analogy is flawed. I agree. Thanks for providing a better one. > Where is reproducibility, if all we can do is SSH into a snowflake live system That's the beauty of this, though. You'd have monoclonal lines of decephalized humans. They're not snowflakes. You'd have knockout lines for studying specific genes, ABO- lines for a blood supply, lines for all the major MHC/HLA for transplants... If you have twenty identical deceph human clones, you can run your same experiment in duplicate and push for statistically meaningful results. Over time we'd aim to reduce the costs of the bodies so that they are cheap to expend in individual experiments. That's when it becomes incredibly powerful, when the average researcher can afford these in their budget. We might learn to control the rate of development. Quickly grow them in a way that doesn't interfere with the experimental results.
      - goblin89 6y ago
        > That's the beauty of this, though. You'd have monoclonal lines of decephalized humans. They're not snowflakes. Your approach does not duplicate the OS, only hardware wiring. Again, not to say fiddling with condensers and transistors can’t fix a misbehaving program, but it’s not always the best way to address the issue with fewest side-effects.