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One of the challenges of medical advancement is finding ways to experiment with new things and determine what the results will be. Today, various methods are employed such as doing the experimentation on animals or people in some cases. These methods obviously pose moral issues for people, and the limited extent to which they can be employed drags the rate of advancement to a crawl. Most of us have fairly free reign in our professions to experiment wildly and take quick advantage of the trial and error method. People developing treatments and drugs for the human body do not have this luxury.
With all we know of the building blocks of life, I find it surprising that have not heard of any project attempting to simulate it completely from a low level. A daunting project to be sure, but would it not be the ultimate tool for medical research while avoiding the suffering? To initiate such a project, one might first determine at what level to base the simulation. For example, do you build from atoms, molecules, proteins, cells, or something higher level? The lower level you go, the more potential for usefulness, but the feasibility of implementation goes down quickly at the same time. I don't know how low level we could hope to attempt a simulation, only now are we beginning to be able to "look" at molecules.
Once a level was decided on, the daunting task of assembling the knowledge base necessary to get started might set in. You would need a physicist, biologist, and computer scientist just to think about getting started. This program from the Defense Sciences Office of DARPA actually looks to have very similar goals with a little different approach. I guess that's one of the few places anything like this would ever be attempted.
After the system was reliably able to simulate general biological systems and outside effects on them like drugs and gene therapies, it may be interesting or necessary for other capabilities to emerge. For example, what if you could take your own sequenced genome and feed it into the simulator to create a more personalized simulation to determine how something might more specifically affect you. It would be interesting to see the differences in the simulated development of yourself compared to the actual development you experienced that was influenced by all the factors of your life. Now that's personalized medicine to the extreme.
While I consider this idea, I wonder if we were actually able to achieve it we might end up faced with the same moral issues we have experimenting on living animals. If a sufficiently advanced system for simulating biology was developed, you might wonder if this "simulation" was so accurately defined that it to would suffer, even if the suffering does not occur in our physical world.
With all we know of the building blocks of life, I find it surprising that have not heard of any project attempting to simulate it completely from a low level. A daunting project to be sure, but would it not be the ultimate tool for medical research while avoiding the suffering? To initiate such a project, one might first determine at what level to base the simulation. For example, do you build from atoms, molecules, proteins, cells, or something higher level? The lower level you go, the more potential for usefulness, but the feasibility of implementation goes down quickly at the same time. I don't know how low level we could hope to attempt a simulation, only now are we beginning to be able to "look" at molecules.
Once a level was decided on, the daunting task of assembling the knowledge base necessary to get started might set in. You would need a physicist, biologist, and computer scientist just to think about getting started. This program from the Defense Sciences Office of DARPA actually looks to have very similar goals with a little different approach. I guess that's one of the few places anything like this would ever be attempted.
After the system was reliably able to simulate general biological systems and outside effects on them like drugs and gene therapies, it may be interesting or necessary for other capabilities to emerge. For example, what if you could take your own sequenced genome and feed it into the simulator to create a more personalized simulation to determine how something might more specifically affect you. It would be interesting to see the differences in the simulated development of yourself compared to the actual development you experienced that was influenced by all the factors of your life. Now that's personalized medicine to the extreme.
While I consider this idea, I wonder if we were actually able to achieve it we might end up faced with the same moral issues we have experimenting on living animals. If a sufficiently advanced system for simulating biology was developed, you might wonder if this "simulation" was so accurately defined that it to would suffer, even if the suffering does not occur in our physical world.
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