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ChoosenUserName4 t1_irmzug3 wrote

He's a programmer, he manipulates bits, things that are subject to the kind of improvements in the digital realm (Moores law, rapid experimentation and prototyping, easy and fast to build upon work done by others, relatively cheap and accessible).

Biology is a whole other animal, because of the experimental part, and the enormous complexity of life. A limitless number of things interacting with lots of other things, with backups and alternative routes, optimizations we don't understand, etc. Just look at how a relatively simple virus like HIV has been studied, how many ways it has to evade the immune system. I think it has been more than 40 years, and we barely made AIDS into a chronic disease that can be managed. That is a virus, something billions times less complex than a mammal.

When I compare the progress made in computing versus biology over the last 20 years, it's not even close. Everyone outside of my field of expertise seem to think biology is something that can be hacked like computers can be. It would require an accurate simulation of an entire human at the molecular level to go as fast as computer science does.

I am not even talking about the costs of doing molecular biology at scale, or putting things on the market. That is prohibitive, holding things back right now. Very few serious players want to cure aging. They're all working on things like Alzheimers, depression, and rheumatoid arthritis.

Don't want to be a party pooper, and I hope to have to eat my words, but I am not holding my breath.

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rationalkat t1_irne362 wrote

You're right, progress in biology and medicine is much slower and much more expensive, but those fields are turning slowly into information technologies. Narrow AI systems like Alphafold2 are just the beginning and Alphafold came as a big surprise for most structural biologists. So there is hope.

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