41–50 of 121 posts
Imagine trying to understand biology like we try to understand what we code day to day. I would need a brain at least 100x as large and efficient.
There are early efforts under way to do just that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg
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This is "the andy grove fallacy": it's not clear that you actually can , because code and computational hardware was designed by humans and biology emphatically was not. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/and...
We are just in the debugging phase.
I don't think that biology is well modeled by "being a meat computer", in general, but as far as the analogy goes ... :
What we are debugging is 4.5 billion years of grad student code in at least a few dozen languages, with no documentation, method names that are outright lies, no separation of concerns at all, the worst spaghetti you've ever seen, god-objects everywhere, no separated state at all, spooky action at a distance, the whole spiel.
We don't have a reliable debugger, you can't trace the stack because the stack changes when you look at it, and the entire thing is running all the time and mutating in a really nasty feedback loop with you.
Oh and there is no software, there's only FPGA-like firmware that reprograms itself all the time and can decide to add or remove logic units basically whenever, or wrap itself in duct tape and baling wire.
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Wouldn’t it need to be clear that we can’t, before it can be called a fallacy?
fsvo "proof", i'm willing to take it as an axiom that biological systems are fractally weird in ways that are extremely resistant to formalism.
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We aren't curing aging any time soon are we :(?
Several companies and research groups are working on it. The challenge is a lack of priority, funding and even recognizing aging as a disease, at least in legal terms. Look up the Sens foundation (Dr. Aubrey De Grey), Dr. David Sinclair (Harvard .. Some are skeptical because he has started several companies) and Dr. Bruce Ames as starting points.
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I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest that it is easier to build a brain scanning machine and simulate you in a computer than to "solve aging". And don't think I underestimate the difficulty of that, either.
Wow. I understand that you are a layperson, but that’s a very strong statement in my view. What do you base it on? Or did you just pull it ”out of a hat”?
Changing genetics seems to me a bit like changing an engine in-flight. Mappping the brain to a computer is more like building a plane from scratch in a hangar.
In a computer, we build the materials but we also build the world around them. With biology, all we have to work with is are the real-life materials, which are harder to grok than their digital equivalents.
* 'Small proteins also promise to revise the current understanding of the genome. Many appear to be encoded in stretches of DNA—and RNA—that were not thought to help build proteins of any sort. Some researchers speculate that the short stretches of DNA could be newborn genes, on their way to evolving into larger genes that make full-size proteins. Thanks in part to small proteins, "We need to rethink what genes are,"…
We aren't curing aging any time soon are we :(?
How are miniproteins any different than just peptides? The article references "miniproteins"as being the same as "minipetides"... as though these are both different from regular peptides. Wikipedia states that peptides are "approximately 50 or fewer amino acids" [0] while minipeptides are "a length of less than 100-150 amino acids" [1]. Is this article really just saying that "peptides are upending cell biology"? [0]…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thionin
that are 45-48 amino acids which is less than the (arbitrary) lower limit of 50.
One distinguishing feature of a protein is that it folds, while peptides usually are too short to have a defined fold.
How are miniproteins any different than just peptides? The article references "miniproteins"as being the same as "minipetides"... as though these are both different from regular peptides. Wikipedia states that peptides are "approximately 50 or fewer amino acids" [0] while minipeptides are "a length of less than 100-150 amino acids" [1]. Is this article really just saying that "peptides are upending cell biology"? [0]…
From the article: > OTHER SHORT AMINO ACID chains, often called peptides or polypeptides, abound in cells, but they are pared-down remnants of bigger predecessors. Myoregulin and its diminutive brethren, in contrast, are born small.
* 'Small proteins also promise to revise the current understanding of the genome. Many appear to be encoded in stretches of DNA—and RNA—that were not thought to help build proteins of any sort. Some researchers speculate that the short stretches of DNA could be newborn genes, on their way to evolving into larger genes that make full-size proteins. Thanks in part to small proteins, "We need to rethink what genes are,"…
We aren't curing aging any time soon are we :(?
The way it reads to me as a lay person, the body just falls apart. Things go wrong. It's not one thing going wrong, it's a very long list of disparate problems that ultimately aren't survivable. Aging isn't a losing battle, it's a massacre. It's one damn thing after another.
What struck me is how our veins go "crunchy" in old age from the build up of calcium and how an expert can tell the age of a person within a 5 year period from just a picture of their gums and teeth. I put the book down and couldn't sleep that night.
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Several companies and research groups are working on it. The challenge is a lack of priority, funding and even recognizing aging as a disease, at least in legal terms. Look up the Sens foundation (Dr. Aubrey De Grey), Dr. David Sinclair (Harvard .. Some are skeptical because he has started several companies) and Dr. Bruce Ames as starting points.
Why Bruce Ames? Bruce Ames is long retired, and his research was on the free radical theory of aging, which is largely seen as a dead-end for the past 15 years after it was realised that merely throwing different antioxidants into the works gummed up the normal function of reactive oxygen species and did nothing or worsened aging.
So while he may have "retired", I mean, he's 90, so it's about time, he most certainly still works full time in the lab.