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A third of people in rich countries die from cancer. There's plenty of money in it. It is just that unregulated cell growth is an extremely difficult problem to

A third of people in rich countries die from cancer. There's plenty of money in it. It is just that unregulated cell growth is an extremely difficult problem to solve.

daniel-cussen 13y ago
We need more regulation! But yeah, there seems to be tons of money in the problem. Take into account how many rich people don't want to die and have cancer. And, while there are many different kinds of cancer, they all just boil down to unregulated cell growth. Could that be solved programmatically? I think so, provided we could interpret existing genetic code and write it from scratch. But we are far from this--at the moment, we can't even read it in long strands very well.
- sgt101 13y ago
  The underpinning assumption seems to be that genetic code works as a program - that there is computation as understood in the sense of Church/Turing. I don't know if that is true. I do know that no one knows if it is true. The other stronger assumption is that the processes that underpin how cells work are mechanistic in the way that we understand mechanistic processes, that is to say that there is no hidden step that invokes "a new physics". Again I say I do not know if this is true, but no one knows that it is true. We are silly apes at the beginning of an intellectual adventure that may last for hundreds of thousands of years, or more. Or it may not, we may snuff ourselves out, or we may find that things are as simple as our current theories seem to intuit. However I would point to the following; until recently (20 years) cosmologists were utterly unaware of 80% of the universe as it is now perceived, there are five models of probability in common use in statistics even though there are probably (geddit) an infinite number of models, no one knows what life is, no one can adequately define intelligence, no one can adequately define consciousness; no one can describe the processes that define a cell; no one can make a list like this that is not risible (seriously). The point is, we know shit, and it's really not surprising given how big the universe is and how long we've been in the game of trying (with any degree of seriousness) to understand it.
  - XorNot 13y ago
    Cells certainly don't have "new physics". But chemistry is the manifold interactions of well understood physics - look up what we're currently studying there to get a sense of the scale of those permutations.

A third of people in rich countries die from cancer. There's plenty of money in it. It is just that unregulated cell growth is an extremely difficult problem to solve.

daniel-cussen 13y ago

We need more regulation! But yeah, there seems to be tons of money in the problem. Take into account how many rich people don't want to die and have cancer. And, while there are many different kinds of cancer, they all just boil down to unregulated cell growth. Could that be solved programmatically? I think so, provided we could interpret existing genetic code and write it from scratch. But we are far from this--at the moment, we can't even read it in long strands very well.

sgt101 13y ago
The underpinning assumption seems to be that genetic code works as a program - that there is computation as understood in the sense of Church/Turing. I don't know if that is true. I do know that no one knows if it is true. The other stronger assumption is that the processes that underpin how cells work are mechanistic in the way that we understand mechanistic processes, that is to say that there is no hidden step that invokes "a new physics". Again I say I do not know if this is true, but no one knows that it is true. We are silly apes at the beginning of an intellectual adventure that may last for hundreds of thousands of years, or more. Or it may not, we may snuff ourselves out, or we may find that things are as simple as our current theories seem to intuit. However I would point to the following; until recently (20 years) cosmologists were utterly unaware of 80% of the universe as it is now perceived, there are five models of probability in common use in statistics even though there are probably (geddit) an infinite number of models, no one knows what life is, no one can adequately define intelligence, no one can adequately define consciousness; no one can describe the processes that define a cell; no one can make a list like this that is not risible (seriously). The point is, we know shit, and it's really not surprising given how big the universe is and how long we've been in the game of trying (with any degree of seriousness) to understand it.
- XorNot 13y ago
  Cells certainly don't have "new physics". But chemistry is the manifold interactions of well understood physics - look up what we're currently studying there to get a sense of the scale of those permutations.