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Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

bbc.com

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Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#181

Post by [deleted] »

jychang wrote: post #98
Animats wrote: post #73

Probably not feasible without some genetic re-engineering to design out vulnerabilities to common diseases. That's how aging will probably be solved. There's a big debug time problem, though. It takes about two generations to be sure you got it right. We'll probably have very long lived mice decades before it works for humans. (Many cancers in mice can be cured now. This doesn't translate to humans.) Then there will…

> Then there will be species conflicts. Merck people won't be able to mate with Novartis people because they'll be too different genetically. I don't think this will be a problem if you get to the point of genetically engineering people. You just can't mate the old fashioned way, but if anything that's a benefit- free birth control. IVF + genetic modification of the egg cell, assuming your technology is that advanced…

[deleted]

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#182

Post by iaw »

idlewords wrote: post #161
iaw wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguable. We can only compare difficulty after the fact, if Einstein hadn't rolled along with relativity and 3 decade gap for research, the atomic bomb wouldn't have been possible. There may be a 'relativity' level discovery in biology/aging/cancer that will change the historic perspective. We can't know until after the fact.

You don't need Einstein or relativity theory to build an atomic bomb. Experimentalists discovered fission, and could have built a bomb even if there were no theoretical basis for it.

You are 100% correct about what could have been. However, the reality is that Einstein's work paved the way for Leo Szilard to envision an atomic bomb before fission had been discovered.

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Med/Discfiss.html

Edit: Reflecting on this, without quantum mechanics (which stemmed from Einstein's relativity work), Oppenheimer would not have had the mathematical tools that were heavily leveraged building the bomb. The bomb is more than throwing together two sub-critical pieces of material, knowledge from quantum mechanics was critical in the prediction of which fissile materials could yield a functional weapon (of which there are very few).

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#183

Post by nixos »

iaw wrote: post #173
rayiner wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between "yes we can!" re: the atomic bomb and Zuckerberg's post is that the former happened after the fundamental discoveries in physics that made the atomic bomb possible. By the time someone said "yes we can!" a theoretical analysis of how the bomb would work already existed. That fundamental advancement in biology hasn't happened yet. That's the difference between rational optimism and irrational an…

Respectfully, I disagree. The fundamental discoveries necessary for the nuclear bomb weren't discover until after Leo Szilard [0] proposed the weapon. Given that none of us were alive between 1906 and 1945 it's hard to fully grasp how the scientific understanding evolved over those 39 years. Einstein's work paved the way for Leo Szilard's vision but that vision was in no way a given. If it weren't for WWII, and Einst…

It wasn't a coin-toss away. The Hiroshima bomb was almost guaranteed to work.

The question if Nagasaki would work, which is why they did Trinity.

The theory was there when the Manhattan project started - it was an engineering hurdle, not a scientific one.

Manhattan Project : Curing Cancer :: Apollo : Warp Drives

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#184

Post by scrollaway »

prewett wrote: post #136
user731955373 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"yes we can!" built the atomic bomb.

"Build an atomic bomb" is a lot more specific than "cure all diseases." In fact, "cure all diseases" is kind of the opposite of a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-based). Whereas, to goal to build a device capable of detonating via nuclear fission is pretty specific, particularly to a physicist. Also very measurable and highly time-based. Not even the Gates foundation is trying to cure all dis…

I agree with you, but I'd like to point out that it's easy to say "x is very specific" if you know exactly what x is after-the-fact.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#185

Post by Cybiote »

iaw wrote: post #124
nixos wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is _much_ (orders of magnitude) easier than curing Cancer

Arguable. We can only compare difficulty after the fact, if Einstein hadn't rolled along with relativity and 3 decade gap for research, the atomic bomb wouldn't have been possible. There may be a 'relativity' level discovery in biology/aging/cancer that will change the historic perspective. We can't know until after the fact.

I strongly disagree that you can only compare difficulty after the fact. The full class of cancers is an object of lots higher complexity than quantum mechanics. For one, you need a theory of quantum mechanics to fully predict from the details of a cell (this is not the same thing as saying cells leverage entanglement and maintain superpositions).

A population of cells is more complex than an atom as it requires more parameters to be fully specified. It is also harder to predict because there are several levels of non-linear feedback interactions within an environment that can never be fully given ahead of time. A population of cancerous cells is more complex than a population of cells because their dynamics are not stationary in time. Unlike a typical population of healthy cells, cancerous ones are able to, in effect learn and more effectively than even the immune system. Extend this to the full class of cancers to see why a simple mathematical theory of the kind we find in atomic physics is highly implausible.

As such, we have an object of higher descriptive and predictive complexity than atomic physics. Searching for this theory will take longer and is much, much more difficult in a formal sense.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#186

Post by [deleted] »

zbyte64 wrote: post #130
iaw wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguable. We can only compare difficulty after the fact, if Einstein hadn't rolled along with relativity and 3 decade gap for research, the atomic bomb wouldn't have been possible. There may be a 'relativity' level discovery in biology/aging/cancer that will change the historic perspective. We can't know until after the fact.

Just from a data volume perspective cancer and atomic bombs are magnitudes apart. Throw in the fact that cancer evolves and understanding those mutations requires unraveling millions of years of evolution and you've got a doozy.

[deleted]

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#187

Post by pazimzadeh »

tominous wrote: post #178
dhbradshaw wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my best prediction for how it's could happen: when the all human immune systems are able to learn from each other, we'll be most of the way there. The immune system is at the center of most human diseases. Cancer? It's the best solution. Infection? Best solution. Autoimmune disease?Fixing the immune system would be the best solution to autoimmune disease. Right now, if you want your body to be immune to someth…

I'm struggling to see how that can be done without in vivo genetic engineering (to ensure immune compatibility), constant blood surveillance of the population (to detect pathogens), chemical infusions deployed en masse like a firmware update, and giant cube-shaped space ships.

How about using commensal bacteria to design an "external immune system" which can respond to any pathogen we program it too. Bacteria coat basically all cavities in your body and could scan incoming threats and respond to them before the human immune system is every involved.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#189

Post by karmicthreat »

So lets say this were possible. Where would be the best place to throw this money? Just researching X disease one by one isn't going to be successful. There are not enough resources available to make that happen that way. Period.

So what if a big leap in computational biology happened? Making faster machines is relatively easier and largely unregulated.

So you focus on simulating disease and some form of automation that tries to cure it. We have the problem of building these models for the computer to crunch on. So why not build them from people. Continuously monitor everything about someone. DNA, the various omics, self reports. All the while machine learning is trying learn these models. So other automations can change them.

So the first thing we need is a way to collect all this data. Itself a major medical breakthrough. How much data do we need to build the models? This seems to be the first breakthrough we need to even approach this.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#190

Post by tominous »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #187
tominous wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm struggling to see how that can be done without in vivo genetic engineering (to ensure immune compatibility), constant blood surveillance of the population (to detect pathogens), chemical infusions deployed en masse like a firmware update, and giant cube-shaped space ships.

How about using commensal bacteria to design an "external immune system" which can respond to any pathogen we program it too. Bacteria coat basically all cavities in your body and could scan incoming threats and respond to them before the human immune system is every involved.

Sure, as long I get to be the programmer and deploy the updates. :) You can call me God-Emperor Tominous.
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