Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100 • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Sep 23, 2016, 9:59 PM UTC

nixos wrote: post #183

iaw wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just amplifying and clarifying your point: Hiroshima was the first practical test of the uranium-bullet method.

Nagasaki was the second practical test of the plutonium implosion method.

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

#342

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 11:10 AM UTC

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…

Will that speciation be driven by genetics or licensing terms?

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

#343

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 11:19 AM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #65

Pharmacology is an interesting example where better technology and scientific understanding have made things worse than earlier, low-tech methods ("inject plant extracts into animals and see what happens"). The number of new drugs discovered per dollar of research has been dropping since 1960, and obvious explanations (like "the easy ones have already been found") turn out not to explain the phenomenon. [ http://www.…

Returns on R&D have been falling across a wide range of disciplines for a long time. Joseph Tainter references work by several other authors, looking at patents and Nobel Prize awards. J. Doyne Farmer and the late John C. Holland both work in the are of technological innovation as well.

I'm not convinced technology and understanding are the causal factors here.

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

#344

Post by gmarx » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 8:57 PM UTC

fnl wrote: post #153

gmarx wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's doesn't even account for the probably larger number of bugs that develop over the lifetime of the system. Then, once a cancer develops it evolves further mutations over time. You probably cannot defeat cancer merely by genetic engineering every new birth

Epigenetics is the word you're looking for here. And probably some healthy dose of metabolomics. Cancer is way more complex than "just" changes in the genetic code.

I don't think so. I'm sure there are epigenetic effects in cancer but I'm also pretty sure that cancers develop new mutations as they proceed. Ones that fool the immune system or chemotherapy agents get selected for and drive the cancer forward