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In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

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Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#11

Post by skwb »

TomMarius wrote: post #7
montereynack wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That literally makes no sense. How exactly would a quantum computer assist us in simulating problems like drug transport and binding? (quite a few problems are purely empirically solved right now) How exactly is biology massively parallel? I suppose you could argue a cell is just a weird form of SIMD but that is a vast oversimplification. We’ve also been doing parallelism pretty much since computers were invented (an…

A cell is a three dimensional environment where many weirdly shaped things interact with each other. It's not entirely unlike calculating a 3D video game. A quantum computer would assist us similarly as it helps in breaking encryption - it helps you search the problem space for a solution (e.g. protein shape) faster. Genomics is basically statistics.

| Genomics is basically statistics.

As someone in a bioinfomatics Ph.D., yes, there is statistics in genomic, but if you don't understand the underlying biology, you're going to be chasing wild statstical gooses. And even then, we sorta all treat our discoveries as temporary, needing wet lab work to help validate our claims. There's just something you cannot simulate.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#12

Post by heisbsissi »

TomMarius wrote: post #7
montereynack wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That literally makes no sense. How exactly would a quantum computer assist us in simulating problems like drug transport and binding? (quite a few problems are purely empirically solved right now) How exactly is biology massively parallel? I suppose you could argue a cell is just a weird form of SIMD but that is a vast oversimplification. We’ve also been doing parallelism pretty much since computers were invented (an…

A cell is a three dimensional environment where many weirdly shaped things interact with each other. It's not entirely unlike calculating a 3D video game. A quantum computer would assist us similarly as it helps in breaking encryption - it helps you search the problem space for a solution (e.g. protein shape) faster. Genomics is basically statistics.

I've never met a single person in my life that did or even thought anything worth a damn that wrote off complicated shit in the sort of blasse way people like you do. X is basically Y, why so complicated? It's easy to say everything is easy and simple when you're aware that you won't be contributing shit and more likely will be an annoyance to someone who will.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#13

Post by skwb »

bedobi wrote: post #6

Yeah, no. Programs and algorithms can only encode models (which are themselves imperfect) of what we already know. There's countless things we know that we don't know, and yet more that we don't know that we don't know. As bad as animal (and human) studies and trials can be, the beauty of them is we don't really have to know how or why things work, we can just do the thing and if the results are good, we have a new t…

This is why I think the quote "All models are wrong, but some are useful" is so meaningful. Lots of bright eyed comp sci majors come into statstical genomics and bioinfomatics PhD programs every year, and all learn the hard lesson that wet lab still exists for a reason.

Not understanding your underlying conceptual model (be it biology here, or maybe healthcare, or natural resource exploration) will lead a lot of poor assumptions, limiting the impact of all the hard work.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#15

Post by rhn_mk1 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #2

This is, quite frankly, ridiculous. Yes, computational models do have a place in science and drug discovery, but I don't know anyone in the field who seriously thinks they will reduce the number of animals used in medical research. If anything, you may see something like the Jevons paradox, where when you increase the efficiency of something (in this case, animals used in medical research), usage actually goes up .

I don't know about the state of current tests, but it doesn't seem to me like the author is necessarily proposing to switch left and right to use computer models instead of a real mice.

Instead, the way I'm reading it, they are recommending to use computer models whenever possible, and only resort to live animal testing when the limits of the modelling are reached.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#16

Post by sk0g »

foobar_ wrote: post #9

Its pointless to use animals in research, it makes no logical sense. Even if the research is successful after 10 years of animal cruelty ... you still have to test it on humans.

What about all the chemicals that never get to human testing due to harmful effects coming up in animal testing? Is that not a net positive from a human perspective?

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#17

Post by foobar_ »

sk0g wrote: post #16
foobar_ wrote: post #9

Its pointless to use animals in research, it makes no logical sense. Even if the research is successful after 10 years of animal cruelty ... you still have to test it on humans.

What about all the chemicals that never get to human testing due to harmful effects coming up in animal testing? Is that not a net positive from a human perspective?

Are there absolutely no alternatives to test that ?

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#18

Post by causality0 »

This is less of a "we will replace natural meat with lab-grown meat" claim and more of a "we will eventually be able to travel to the moon using only a megajoule of energy" claim. It would take a vast change in our basic understanding of physics to effect such an innovation. The crux of the matter is that mouse bodies don't simulate mouse bodies, they are mouse bodies. The idea you could have something the size of a mouse body that could fully simulate a mouse body is ridiculous. Biology is computationally efficient.

The University of Nevada used a 360 TFLOP supercomputer to simulate a mouse brain. They managed to simulate the neurons firing once every ten seconds. In reality neurons fire an average of 200 times per second. Even if their model was fully accurate, that means you need 720PFLOPS to simulate just the brain of a single mouse.

Barring computers based on completely different principles or a revolution in the way we understand physics, a installation at a single facility will never be able to fully simulate hundreds of experimental mice.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#19

Post by chrisco255 »

bedobi wrote: post #6

Yeah, no. Programs and algorithms can only encode models (which are themselves imperfect) of what we already know. There's countless things we know that we don't know, and yet more that we don't know that we don't know. As bad as animal (and human) studies and trials can be, the beauty of them is we don't really have to know how or why things work, we can just do the thing and if the results are good, we have a new t…

I would argue we can't even model those things. Non-linear, dynamic systems are not predictable beyond a certain point even if you have a perfect model. Uncertainty with models of dynamic systems like biological ones, increases exponentially as a function of time. And they are highly sensitive to initial conditions, so if your input is off from reality by even the tiniest amount, reality will veer off dramatically from your expected results, even if you have the perfect model. Chaos theory is a thing. We can use models to learn about systems and how they might work, or how we might think they work, but we can't use them to model reality effectively enough to determine treatments.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#20

Post by cellis »

Who here has watched as much Black Mirror/Westworld as I have and know how this ends? My question is, if a robot is engineered well enough to replicate the "real" thing, then when you test on it, aren't you just shifting the torture from "living" to another thing yet to be granted the rights of the living? If you answer "no", then you have to admit that the model is incomplete and it does not in fact feel pain and is thus in an inadequate replica. Also agree with other comments that this is and will remain computationally infeasible at least until production quantum computers arrive.
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