3 ms·

Bioengineering and synthetic biology will never be like electrical engineering, but some of the differences can be exploited. For one, you can use directed evo

Bioengineering and synthetic biology will never be like electrical engineering, but some of the differences can be exploited. For one, you can use directed evolution to optimize a biological system without relying on rational design. For another, biological development is massively flexible. Consider that when you evolve a longer arm, you don't need to mutate genes to ensure you have longer muscles, tendons, nerves, etc. In fact, you can grow an entirely new arm by just initiating a limb bud at the correct time in development. By contrast, in electrical engineering all design aspects are "rational" - when you change one part, you must change the other parts to compensate. Modularity and reductionism are "problems" only in the sense that they reflect differences between our engineering strategy and the substrate we are trying to engineer. We must discover the engineering principles that match the substrate.

PeterisP 13y ago
As you say, even futuristic bioengineering will never be like electrical engineering, but it does have parallels with software development. It feels somewhat similar to declarative programming - our genes contain a large bunch of code that, in effect, says 'if you're seeing chemical X (which should mean that you're on the edge of a limb bud, then produce chemical Y/grow differently/become a skin cell'. And a bug in some other, far-away code can make an embryo grow, for example, a sixth toe, by invoking already existing code that will connect it to your foot and add toenails. And we have some idea on how to work with such code - sure, it's far away from what we'd call well engineered or intelligently designed code, it's a big horrible pile of buggy spaghetti code that mostly works in most conditions if we discount the large portion of cases where the egg doesn't even develop into a valid embryo. And there's 'bug parity' where fixing a single-item bug is likely to create another bug elsewhere because it relied on the first part being always buggy. And, of course, it's undocumented obfuscated 'assembly code'. But the advantage is that it's only a singe codebase (although even larger than healthcare.gov) with no 'completely new and different' releases coming, so all of us together have to learn it once, and it is almost the same codebase that we'd also use to alter our corn, cows, flu and mosquitoes.

PeterisP 13y ago

As you say, even futuristic bioengineering will never be like electrical engineering, but it does have parallels with software development. It feels somewhat similar to declarative programming - our genes contain a large bunch of code that, in effect, says 'if you're seeing chemical X (which should mean that you're on the edge of a limb bud, then produce chemical Y/grow differently/become a skin cell'. And a bug in some other, far-away code can make an embryo grow, for example, a sixth toe, by invoking already existing code that will connect it to your foot and add toenails. And we have some idea on how to work with such code - sure, it's far away from what we'd call well engineered or intelligently designed code, it's a big horrible pile of buggy spaghetti code that mostly works in most conditions if we discount the large portion of cases where the egg doesn't even develop into a valid embryo. And there's 'bug parity' where fixing a single-item bug is likely to create another bug elsewhere because it relied on the first part being always buggy. And, of course, it's undocumented obfuscated 'assembly code'. But the advantage is that it's only a singe codebase (although even larger than healthcare.gov) with no 'completely new and different' releases coming, so all of us together have to learn it once, and it is almost the same codebase that we'd also use to alter our corn, cows, flu and mosquitoes.