It’s easy to point fingers at a very sick subset of scientific endeavors—biomedical research. The reasons it is messed up and not very productive are myriad. Fake and non-reproducible results that waste everyone’s time are one facet of the problem. The big one I observed was that trying to make a useful tool to solve a real problem with the human body is NOT something that the traditional model can handle very well. The human body is so immensely complex. This means that “easy” solutions are not going to work. You can’t repair a jet engine by putting sawdust in the engine oil or some other cheap trick, can you? Why would you think a very small molecule that can interact with any one of tens of thousands of proteins in an unpredictable manner could fix anything either? (or a beam of radiation, or chopping out an entire sub-system and replacing it with a shoddy substitute made by cannibalizing something else, or delivering crude electric shocks to a huge region. I’ve just named nearly every trick in the arsenal)
Most biomedical research is slanted towards this “cheap trick” solution, however. The reason is because the model encourages it. University research teams usually consist of a principle investigator and a small cadre of graduate students, and a relatively small budget. They are under a deadline to come up with something-anything useful within a few years, and the failures don’t receive tenure and are fired. Pharmaceutical research teams also want a quick and cheap solution, generally, for a similar reason. Most of the low hanging fruit—small molecule drugs that are safe and effective—has already been plucked, and in any case there is a limit to the problems in biological systems that can actually be fixed with small molecules. If a complex machine is broken, you usually need to shut it off and replace major components. You are not going to be able to spray some magic oil and fix the fault.
For example, how might you plausible cure cancer? Well, what do cancer cells share in common? Markers on the outside of the cells? Nope, if there were, the immune system would usually detect them. Are the cells always making some foreign protein? Nope, same problem. All tumors share mutated genes, and thus have mRNAs present in the cells that you can detect.
So how might you exploit this? Somehow you have to build a tool that can get into cells near the tumor and detect the ones with these faulty mRNAs(and kills them). Also, this tool needs to not affect healthy cells.
If you break down the components of the tool, you realize it would have to be quite complex, with many sub-elements that have to be developed. You cannot solve this problem with 10 people and a few million dollars. You probably need many interrelated teams, all of whom are tasked with developing separate components of the tool. (with prizes if they succeed, and multiple teams working on each component using a different method to minimize risks)
No one is going to magically publish a working paper in Nature tomorrow where they have succeeded in such an effort overnight. Yet, this is basically what the current system expects. Somehow someone is going to cure cancer tomorrow without there being an actual integrated plan, with the billions of dollars in resources needed, and a sound game plan that minimizes risk and rewards individual successes.
Professors I have pointed this out to say that no central agency can possibly “know” what a successful cancer cure might look like. The current system just funds anyone who wants to try anything, assuming they pass review and have the right credentials. Thus a large variety of things are tried. I don’t see it. I don’t think there is a valid solution to cancer that can be found with a small team just trying things with a million or 2 of equipment, supplies, and personnel.
Growing replacement organs is a similar endeavor. Small teams have managed to show that it is viable—but they cannot actually solve the serious problems because they lack the resources to go about it in a systematic and likely to succeed way. While Wake Forest has demonstrated years ago that they can make a small heart that beats, there isn’t a huge team of thousands systematically attacking each element of the problem that has to be solved to make full scale replacement hearts.
One final note : this ultimately points to gross misapplication of resources. Our society spends billions to kill a few Muslims who MIGHT kill some people violently. It spends billions to incarcerate millions of people for life who individually MIGHT commit some murders. It spends billions on nursing homes and end of life care to statistically extend the lives of millions by a matter of months.
Yet real solutions to problems that kill nearly everyone, for certain, are not worth the money to solve them in a systematic way.
The reason for this is lack of rationality. Human beings fear emotionally extremely rare causes of death much more than extremely likely, “natural” causes. They fear the idea of a few disgruntled Muslims or a criminal who was let out of prison murdering them far more than they fear their heart suddenly failing or their tissues developing a tumor when they are old.
The institution of medicine, defined as “understanding the human body well enough to, from basic principles, directly and intentionally repair diagnosed faults”, only barely exists, and it is called surgery.
The historic division between medicine (as descended from folk remedies and alchemy) and surgery (as descended from the unsubtle craft of closing wounds and amputating limbs) is illustrative here. Medicine, by definition, is holistic. It descends from folk remedies, alchemy, and enchanted unguents. It has only recently and intermittently shown the slightest interest in drug mechanisms, and even that only to the extent that the analysis of drug mechanisms facilitates the development of new and profitable drugs. Medicine has never been about anything /but/ “adding small molecules to the oil”, though it has been far more prestigious then surgery for about a century, since the late 19th century discoveries of narcotics, antibiotics, and vaccines. [Prior to this surgeons were considered far more reliable within their area of expertise, although neither had the degree of professionalization and societal status that they enjoy today.] You make the argument, and I’m inclined to agree, that medicine may very well be playing itself out—that the model that grabbed all the low hanging fruit there is more or less obsolete.
The future of medicine isn’t medicine at all. It’s nano-surgery. Though I suspect there will be a big turf war between medical professionals and surgical professionals as the medical professionals seek to redefine themselves as the ones implementing the procedures that actually work.
Meh, another buzzword. I actually don’t think we’ll see nanosurgery for a very long time, and we should be able to solve the problem of “death” many generations of tech before we can do nano-surgery.
Think about what you actually need to do this. You need a small robot, composed of non-biological parts at the nanoscale. Presumably, this would be diamondoid components such as motors, gears, bearings, etc as well as internal power storage, propulsion, sensors, and so on. The reason for non-biological parts is that biological parts are too floppy and unpredictable and are too difficult to rationally engineer into a working machine.
Anyways, this machine is very precisely made, probably manufactured in a perfect vacuum at low temperatures. Putting it into a dirty liquid environment will require many generations of engineering past the first generation of nanomachinery that can only function in a perfect vacuum at low temperatures. And it has to deal with power and communication issues.
Now, how does this machine actually repair anything? Perhaps it can clean up plaques in the arteries, but how does it fix the faulty DNA in damaged skin cells that cause the skin to sag with age? How does it enter a living cell without damaging it? How does it operate inside a living cell without getting shoved around away from where it needs to be? How do it’s sensors work in such a chaotic environment?
I’m not saying it can’t be done. In fact, I am pretty sure it can be done. I’m saying that this is a VERY VERY hard engineering problem, one that would require inconceivable amounts of effort. Using modern techniques this problem may in fact be so complex to solve that even if we had the information about biology and the nanoscale needed to even start on this project, it might be infeasible with modern resources.
If you have these machines, you have a machine that can create other nanomachines, with atomically precise components. Your machine probably needs a vacuum and low temperatures, as before. Well, that machine can probably make variants of itself that are far simpler to design than a biologically compatible repair robot. Say a variant that instead of performing additive manufacturing at the nanoscale, it can tear down an existing object at the nanoscale and inform the control machinery about the pattern it finds.
Anyways, long story short : with a lot less effort, the same technology needed for nanosurgery to be possible could deconstruct preserved human brains and build computers powerful enough to simulate these brains accurately and at high speed. This solves the problem of “death” quite neatly : rather than trying to patch up your decaying mass of biological tissue with nanosurgery, you get yourself preserved and converted into a computer simulation that does not decay at all.
I think you may have misunderstood me. By “nanosurgery” I meant not solely Drexlerian medical nanobots (though I wasn’t ruling them out). Any drug whose design deliberately and intentionally causes specific, deliberate, and intentional changes to cell-level and molecular-level components of the human body, deliberately and consciously designed with a deep knowledge of the protein structures and cellular metabolic pathways involved, qualifies as nanosurgery, by my definition.
I contrast nanosurgery: deliberate, intentional action controlling the activity or structure of cellular-components—with medicine: the application of small molecules to the human metabolism to create a global, holistic effect with incomplete or nonexistent knowledge of the specific functional mechanisms. Surgery’s salient characteristic is that it is intentional and deliberate manipulation to repair functionality. Medicine’s salient characteristic is that it is a mapping of cause [primarily drug administration] to effect [changes in reported symptoms], with significantly reduced emphasis on the functional chain of causation between the two. As you said above, medicine is defined as “cheap tricks”. That’s what it does. That’s what it’s always been. When you’re doing something intentional to a specific piece of a human to modify or repair it’s functionality, that’s surgery, whether it’s done at the cellular or molecular level (nanosurgery) or at the macroscopic level (conventional surgery).
Prior to about 20 years ago, the vast majority of drugs were developed as medicine. Nowadays, more and more attempts at drug design are at least partially attempts to engineer tools for nanosurgery, per this definition. This is a good thing, and I see the trend continuing. If Drexlerian medical nanobots are possible at all, they would represent the logical endpoint of this trend, but I agree they represent an incredible engineering challenge and they may or may not end up being an economical technology for fixing broken human bodies.
Again, this is one of those approaches that sounds good at a conference, but when you actually sit there and think about it rationally, it shows it’s flaws.
Even if you know exactly what pathway to hit, a small molecule by definition will get everywhere and gum up the works for many, many other systems in the body. It’s almost impossible not to. Sure, there’s a tiny solution space of small molecules that are safe enough to use despite this, but even then you’re going to have side effects and you still have not fixed anything. The reason the cells are giving up and failing as a person ages is that their genetic code has reached a stage that calls for this. We’re still teasing out the exact regulatory mechanisms, but the evidence for this is overwhelming.
No small molecule can fix this problem. Say one of the side effects of this end of life regulatory status is that some cells have intracellular calcium levels that are too high, and another set has them too low. Tell me a small molecule exists out of the billions of possibilities that can fix this.
DNA patching and code update is something that would basically require Drexelerian nanorobotics, subject to the issues above.
Methods to “rollback” cells to their previous developmental states, then re-differentiate them to functional components for a laboratory grown replacement organ actually fix this problem.
For some reason, most of the resources (funding and people) is not pouring into rushing Drexelerian nanorobotics or replacement organs to the prototype stage.
Great analysis. A lot of people think that science follows an inevitable and predetermined progression of truths - a “tech tree” determined by the cosmos—but that’s clearly not the case, especially in the field of medicine.
Sometimes I rant about how computer vision’s fatal flaw is that it is intellectually descended from Computer Science, and so the field looks for results conceptually similar to the great achievements of CS—fast algorithms, proofs of convergence, complexity bounds, fully general frameworks, etc. But what people should really be doing is studying images—heading out into the world and documenting the visual structures and patterns they observe.
They are under a deadline to come up with something-anything useful within a few years
For better or worse, being useful isn’t something that’s important for academic biology research. If you discover a new biochemical pathway, you get published whether or not the knowledge helps anybody to do something useful.
No one is going to magically publish a working paper in Nature tomorrow where they have succeeded in such an effort overnight. Yet, this is basically what the current system expects.
That’s I don’t see why someone who would develop something that would work as one of the components of the tool wouldn’t get published in Nature.
Our society spends billions to kill a few Muslims who MIGHT kill some people violently.
That’s a very naive way to look at things. Killing a few Muslims who MIGHT kill some people violently isn’t the only goal of the various wars. As long as you pretend it is things are hard to understand.
I totally agree that basic research is underfunded. In terms of constructive criticism, the issue of defense spending is isomorphic to your war-on-terror point, but is much less controversial. I might edit the post to remove this just to avoid a controversy different than your main point.
You missed the boat completely. Not modding down because this is an easy cognitive error to make, and I just hit you with a wall of text that does need better editing.
I just said that the model of “basic research” is WRONG. You can’t throw billions at individual groups, each eating away a tiny piece of the puzzle doing basic research and expect to get a working device that fixes the real problems.
You’ll get rafts of “papers” that each try to inform the world about some tiny element about how things work, but fail miserably in their mission for a bunch of reasons.
Instead you need targeted, GOAL oriented research, and a game plan to win. When groups learn things, they need to update a wiki or some other information management tool with what they have found out and how certain they are correct—not hide their actual discovery in a huge jargon laden paper with 50 references at the end.
Fair enough—you don’t believe in research that isn’t directed at a particular problem (aka basic research). That’s totally independent of your criticism of “cheap trick” biomedical research—which is a structural function of the fact that companies who make their money providing “cheap tricks” are the ones doing most of the funding. And I stand by my assertion that your references to other irrational funding priorities is a massive distraction from your point.
In general, I think we are a lot farther from solving the problem than you seem to acknowledge. It isn’t that someone knows how to cure/fix cancer but isn’t being funded. It’s that Science as a whole has no idea what might work.
The method I described WILL work. The laws of physics say it will. Small scale experiments show it working. It isn’t that complicated to understand. Bad mRNA present = cell dies. All tumors, no matter what, have bad mRNAs, wherever they happen to be found in the body.
But it has to be developed and refined, with huge resources put into each element of the problem.
Here, specifically, is the difference between my proposed method and the current ‘state of the art’. Ok, so the NIH holds a big meeting. They draw a massive flow chart. Team 1,2,3 - your expertise is in immunology. Find a coating that will evade the immune system and can encapsulate a large enough device. Million dollar prize to the first team that succeeds. Here are the specific criteria for success.
Team 4 - for some reason, health cells are dying when too many copies of the prototype device are injected. Million dollars if you can find a solution to this problem within 6 months.
Team 5 - we need alternate chemotherapy agents to attach to this device.
Team 6 - we need a manufacturing method.
Once a goal is identified and a team is assigned, they are allocated resources within a week. Rather than awarding and penny pinching funds, the overall effort has a huge budget and equipment is purchased or loaned between groups as needed. The teams would be working in massive integrated laboratories located across the country, with multiple teams in each laboratory for cross trading of skills and ideas.
And so on and so forth. The current model is “ok, so you want to research if near infrared lasers and tumor cells will work. You have this lengthy list of paper credentials, and lasers and cancer sound like buzzwords we like to hear. Also your buddies all rubber stamped your idea during review. Here’s your funds, hope to see a paper in 2 years”...
No one ever considers “how likely are actually going to be better than using high frequency radiation we already have? How much time is this really going to buy a patient even if this is a better method?”.
The fact is, I’ve looked at the list of all ongoing research at several major institutions, and they are usually nearly all projects of similarly questionable long term utility. Sure, maybe a miracle will happen and someone will discover and easy and cheap method that works incredibly well that no one ever thought would work.
But a molecular machine, composed of mostly organic protein based parts, that detects bad mRNAs and kills the cell is an idea that WILL work. It DOES work in rats. More importantly, it is a method that can potentially hunt down tumor cells of any type, no matter where they are hiding, no matter how many metastases are present.
Anyone using rational thought would realize that this is an idea that actually is nearly certain to work (well, in the long run, not saying a big research project might not hit a few showstoppers along the way).
And there is money going to this idea—but it’s having to compete with 1000 other methods that don’t have the potential to actually kill every tumor cell in a patient and cure them.
No one ever considers “how likely are actually going to be better than using high frequency radiation we already have? How much time is this really going to buy a patient even if this is a better method?”.
You can’t know such things beforehand. That’s why they call it research.
Look at a central technique of molecular biology like the usage of monoclonal antibodies.
The funding to develop the technique came from cancer research. People hoped it would be a way good way to kill cancer cells. They didn’t had the success with cancers cells that they hoped for. On the other hand molecular biology would be a lot less productive if we didn’t have monoclonal antibodies.
Doing basic research with near infrared lasers and cancer is similar.
And there is money going to this idea—but it’s having to compete with 1000 other methods that don’t have the potential to actually kill every tumor cell in a patient and cure them.
That’s false. Even today some cancer patients get cured from their cancer by taking big pharma drugs.
But a molecular machine, composed of mostly organic protein based parts, that detects bad mRNAs and kills the cell is an idea that WILL work. It DOES work in rats.
If there’s enough funding for such an idea to make it work in rats in the current system, doesn’t that negate your central point?
If people in academia make it works in rats, taking it from working in rats to working in humans is the job of biotech or bigpharma.
If bigpharma thinks that such an idea is really promising they could invest billions into the idea and attack the problem systematically.
It’s easy to point fingers at a very sick subset of scientific endeavors—biomedical research. The reasons it is messed up and not very productive are myriad. Fake and non-reproducible results that waste everyone’s time are one facet of the problem. The big one I observed was that trying to make a useful tool to solve a real problem with the human body is NOT something that the traditional model can handle very well. The human body is so immensely complex. This means that “easy” solutions are not going to work. You can’t repair a jet engine by putting sawdust in the engine oil or some other cheap trick, can you? Why would you think a very small molecule that can interact with any one of tens of thousands of proteins in an unpredictable manner could fix anything either? (or a beam of radiation, or chopping out an entire sub-system and replacing it with a shoddy substitute made by cannibalizing something else, or delivering crude electric shocks to a huge region. I’ve just named nearly every trick in the arsenal)
Most biomedical research is slanted towards this “cheap trick” solution, however. The reason is because the model encourages it. University research teams usually consist of a principle investigator and a small cadre of graduate students, and a relatively small budget. They are under a deadline to come up with something-anything useful within a few years, and the failures don’t receive tenure and are fired. Pharmaceutical research teams also want a quick and cheap solution, generally, for a similar reason. Most of the low hanging fruit—small molecule drugs that are safe and effective—has already been plucked, and in any case there is a limit to the problems in biological systems that can actually be fixed with small molecules. If a complex machine is broken, you usually need to shut it off and replace major components. You are not going to be able to spray some magic oil and fix the fault.
For example, how might you plausible cure cancer? Well, what do cancer cells share in common? Markers on the outside of the cells? Nope, if there were, the immune system would usually detect them. Are the cells always making some foreign protein? Nope, same problem. All tumors share mutated genes, and thus have mRNAs present in the cells that you can detect.
So how might you exploit this? Somehow you have to build a tool that can get into cells near the tumor and detect the ones with these faulty mRNAs(and kills them). Also, this tool needs to not affect healthy cells.
If you break down the components of the tool, you realize it would have to be quite complex, with many sub-elements that have to be developed. You cannot solve this problem with 10 people and a few million dollars. You probably need many interrelated teams, all of whom are tasked with developing separate components of the tool. (with prizes if they succeed, and multiple teams working on each component using a different method to minimize risks)
No one is going to magically publish a working paper in Nature tomorrow where they have succeeded in such an effort overnight. Yet, this is basically what the current system expects. Somehow someone is going to cure cancer tomorrow without there being an actual integrated plan, with the billions of dollars in resources needed, and a sound game plan that minimizes risk and rewards individual successes.
Professors I have pointed this out to say that no central agency can possibly “know” what a successful cancer cure might look like. The current system just funds anyone who wants to try anything, assuming they pass review and have the right credentials. Thus a large variety of things are tried. I don’t see it. I don’t think there is a valid solution to cancer that can be found with a small team just trying things with a million or 2 of equipment, supplies, and personnel.
Growing replacement organs is a similar endeavor. Small teams have managed to show that it is viable—but they cannot actually solve the serious problems because they lack the resources to go about it in a systematic and likely to succeed way. While Wake Forest has demonstrated years ago that they can make a small heart that beats, there isn’t a huge team of thousands systematically attacking each element of the problem that has to be solved to make full scale replacement hearts.
One final note : this ultimately points to gross misapplication of resources. Our society spends billions to kill a few Muslims who MIGHT kill some people violently. It spends billions to incarcerate millions of people for life who individually MIGHT commit some murders. It spends billions on nursing homes and end of life care to statistically extend the lives of millions by a matter of months.
Yet real solutions to problems that kill nearly everyone, for certain, are not worth the money to solve them in a systematic way.
The reason for this is lack of rationality. Human beings fear emotionally extremely rare causes of death much more than extremely likely, “natural” causes. They fear the idea of a few disgruntled Muslims or a criminal who was let out of prison murdering them far more than they fear their heart suddenly failing or their tissues developing a tumor when they are old.
The institution of medicine, defined as “understanding the human body well enough to, from basic principles, directly and intentionally repair diagnosed faults”, only barely exists, and it is called surgery.
The historic division between medicine (as descended from folk remedies and alchemy) and surgery (as descended from the unsubtle craft of closing wounds and amputating limbs) is illustrative here. Medicine, by definition, is holistic. It descends from folk remedies, alchemy, and enchanted unguents. It has only recently and intermittently shown the slightest interest in drug mechanisms, and even that only to the extent that the analysis of drug mechanisms facilitates the development of new and profitable drugs. Medicine has never been about anything /but/ “adding small molecules to the oil”, though it has been far more prestigious then surgery for about a century, since the late 19th century discoveries of narcotics, antibiotics, and vaccines. [Prior to this surgeons were considered far more reliable within their area of expertise, although neither had the degree of professionalization and societal status that they enjoy today.] You make the argument, and I’m inclined to agree, that medicine may very well be playing itself out—that the model that grabbed all the low hanging fruit there is more or less obsolete.
The future of medicine isn’t medicine at all. It’s nano-surgery. Though I suspect there will be a big turf war between medical professionals and surgical professionals as the medical professionals seek to redefine themselves as the ones implementing the procedures that actually work.
Meh, another buzzword. I actually don’t think we’ll see nanosurgery for a very long time, and we should be able to solve the problem of “death” many generations of tech before we can do nano-surgery.
Think about what you actually need to do this. You need a small robot, composed of non-biological parts at the nanoscale. Presumably, this would be diamondoid components such as motors, gears, bearings, etc as well as internal power storage, propulsion, sensors, and so on. The reason for non-biological parts is that biological parts are too floppy and unpredictable and are too difficult to rationally engineer into a working machine.
Anyways, this machine is very precisely made, probably manufactured in a perfect vacuum at low temperatures. Putting it into a dirty liquid environment will require many generations of engineering past the first generation of nanomachinery that can only function in a perfect vacuum at low temperatures. And it has to deal with power and communication issues.
Now, how does this machine actually repair anything? Perhaps it can clean up plaques in the arteries, but how does it fix the faulty DNA in damaged skin cells that cause the skin to sag with age? How does it enter a living cell without damaging it? How does it operate inside a living cell without getting shoved around away from where it needs to be? How do it’s sensors work in such a chaotic environment?
I’m not saying it can’t be done. In fact, I am pretty sure it can be done. I’m saying that this is a VERY VERY hard engineering problem, one that would require inconceivable amounts of effort. Using modern techniques this problem may in fact be so complex to solve that even if we had the information about biology and the nanoscale needed to even start on this project, it might be infeasible with modern resources.
If you have these machines, you have a machine that can create other nanomachines, with atomically precise components. Your machine probably needs a vacuum and low temperatures, as before. Well, that machine can probably make variants of itself that are far simpler to design than a biologically compatible repair robot. Say a variant that instead of performing additive manufacturing at the nanoscale, it can tear down an existing object at the nanoscale and inform the control machinery about the pattern it finds.
Anyways, long story short : with a lot less effort, the same technology needed for nanosurgery to be possible could deconstruct preserved human brains and build computers powerful enough to simulate these brains accurately and at high speed. This solves the problem of “death” quite neatly : rather than trying to patch up your decaying mass of biological tissue with nanosurgery, you get yourself preserved and converted into a computer simulation that does not decay at all.
I think you may have misunderstood me. By “nanosurgery” I meant not solely Drexlerian medical nanobots (though I wasn’t ruling them out). Any drug whose design deliberately and intentionally causes specific, deliberate, and intentional changes to cell-level and molecular-level components of the human body, deliberately and consciously designed with a deep knowledge of the protein structures and cellular metabolic pathways involved, qualifies as nanosurgery, by my definition.
I contrast nanosurgery: deliberate, intentional action controlling the activity or structure of cellular-components—with medicine: the application of small molecules to the human metabolism to create a global, holistic effect with incomplete or nonexistent knowledge of the specific functional mechanisms. Surgery’s salient characteristic is that it is intentional and deliberate manipulation to repair functionality. Medicine’s salient characteristic is that it is a mapping of cause [primarily drug administration] to effect [changes in reported symptoms], with significantly reduced emphasis on the functional chain of causation between the two. As you said above, medicine is defined as “cheap tricks”. That’s what it does. That’s what it’s always been. When you’re doing something intentional to a specific piece of a human to modify or repair it’s functionality, that’s surgery, whether it’s done at the cellular or molecular level (nanosurgery) or at the macroscopic level (conventional surgery).
Prior to about 20 years ago, the vast majority of drugs were developed as medicine. Nowadays, more and more attempts at drug design are at least partially attempts to engineer tools for nanosurgery, per this definition. This is a good thing, and I see the trend continuing. If Drexlerian medical nanobots are possible at all, they would represent the logical endpoint of this trend, but I agree they represent an incredible engineering challenge and they may or may not end up being an economical technology for fixing broken human bodies.
Again, this is one of those approaches that sounds good at a conference, but when you actually sit there and think about it rationally, it shows it’s flaws.
Even if you know exactly what pathway to hit, a small molecule by definition will get everywhere and gum up the works for many, many other systems in the body. It’s almost impossible not to. Sure, there’s a tiny solution space of small molecules that are safe enough to use despite this, but even then you’re going to have side effects and you still have not fixed anything. The reason the cells are giving up and failing as a person ages is that their genetic code has reached a stage that calls for this. We’re still teasing out the exact regulatory mechanisms, but the evidence for this is overwhelming.
No small molecule can fix this problem. Say one of the side effects of this end of life regulatory status is that some cells have intracellular calcium levels that are too high, and another set has them too low. Tell me a small molecule exists out of the billions of possibilities that can fix this.
DNA patching and code update is something that would basically require Drexelerian nanorobotics, subject to the issues above.
Methods to “rollback” cells to their previous developmental states, then re-differentiate them to functional components for a laboratory grown replacement organ actually fix this problem.
For some reason, most of the resources (funding and people) is not pouring into rushing Drexelerian nanorobotics or replacement organs to the prototype stage.
Great analysis. A lot of people think that science follows an inevitable and predetermined progression of truths - a “tech tree” determined by the cosmos—but that’s clearly not the case, especially in the field of medicine.
Sometimes I rant about how computer vision’s fatal flaw is that it is intellectually descended from Computer Science, and so the field looks for results conceptually similar to the great achievements of CS—fast algorithms, proofs of convergence, complexity bounds, fully general frameworks, etc. But what people should really be doing is studying images—heading out into the world and documenting the visual structures and patterns they observe.
For better or worse, being useful isn’t something that’s important for academic biology research. If you discover a new biochemical pathway, you get published whether or not the knowledge helps anybody to do something useful.
That’s I don’t see why someone who would develop something that would work as one of the components of the tool wouldn’t get published in Nature.
That’s a very naive way to look at things. Killing a few Muslims who MIGHT kill some people violently isn’t the only goal of the various wars. As long as you pretend it is things are hard to understand.
I’m pretty sure this also applies to machine learning research. See this.
I totally agree that basic research is underfunded. In terms of constructive criticism, the issue of defense spending is isomorphic to your war-on-terror point, but is much less controversial. I might edit the post to remove this just to avoid a controversy different than your main point.
You missed the boat completely. Not modding down because this is an easy cognitive error to make, and I just hit you with a wall of text that does need better editing.
I just said that the model of “basic research” is WRONG. You can’t throw billions at individual groups, each eating away a tiny piece of the puzzle doing basic research and expect to get a working device that fixes the real problems.
You’ll get rafts of “papers” that each try to inform the world about some tiny element about how things work, but fail miserably in their mission for a bunch of reasons.
Instead you need targeted, GOAL oriented research, and a game plan to win. When groups learn things, they need to update a wiki or some other information management tool with what they have found out and how certain they are correct—not hide their actual discovery in a huge jargon laden paper with 50 references at the end.
Fair enough—you don’t believe in research that isn’t directed at a particular problem (aka basic research). That’s totally independent of your criticism of “cheap trick” biomedical research—which is a structural function of the fact that companies who make their money providing “cheap tricks” are the ones doing most of the funding. And I stand by my assertion that your references to other irrational funding priorities is a massive distraction from your point.
In general, I think we are a lot farther from solving the problem than you seem to acknowledge. It isn’t that someone knows how to cure/fix cancer but isn’t being funded. It’s that Science as a whole has no idea what might work.
The method I described WILL work. The laws of physics say it will. Small scale experiments show it working. It isn’t that complicated to understand. Bad mRNA present = cell dies. All tumors, no matter what, have bad mRNAs, wherever they happen to be found in the body.
But it has to be developed and refined, with huge resources put into each element of the problem.
Here, specifically, is the difference between my proposed method and the current ‘state of the art’. Ok, so the NIH holds a big meeting. They draw a massive flow chart. Team 1,2,3 - your expertise is in immunology. Find a coating that will evade the immune system and can encapsulate a large enough device. Million dollar prize to the first team that succeeds. Here are the specific criteria for success.
Team 4 - for some reason, health cells are dying when too many copies of the prototype device are injected. Million dollars if you can find a solution to this problem within 6 months.
Team 5 - we need alternate chemotherapy agents to attach to this device.
Team 6 - we need a manufacturing method.
Once a goal is identified and a team is assigned, they are allocated resources within a week. Rather than awarding and penny pinching funds, the overall effort has a huge budget and equipment is purchased or loaned between groups as needed. The teams would be working in massive integrated laboratories located across the country, with multiple teams in each laboratory for cross trading of skills and ideas.
And so on and so forth. The current model is “ok, so you want to research if near infrared lasers and tumor cells will work. You have this lengthy list of paper credentials, and lasers and cancer sound like buzzwords we like to hear. Also your buddies all rubber stamped your idea during review. Here’s your funds, hope to see a paper in 2 years”...
No one ever considers “how likely are actually going to be better than using high frequency radiation we already have? How much time is this really going to buy a patient even if this is a better method?”.
The fact is, I’ve looked at the list of all ongoing research at several major institutions, and they are usually nearly all projects of similarly questionable long term utility. Sure, maybe a miracle will happen and someone will discover and easy and cheap method that works incredibly well that no one ever thought would work.
But a molecular machine, composed of mostly organic protein based parts, that detects bad mRNAs and kills the cell is an idea that WILL work. It DOES work in rats. More importantly, it is a method that can potentially hunt down tumor cells of any type, no matter where they are hiding, no matter how many metastases are present.
Anyone using rational thought would realize that this is an idea that actually is nearly certain to work (well, in the long run, not saying a big research project might not hit a few showstoppers along the way).
And there is money going to this idea—but it’s having to compete with 1000 other methods that don’t have the potential to actually kill every tumor cell in a patient and cure them.
You can’t know such things beforehand. That’s why they call it research. Look at a central technique of molecular biology like the usage of monoclonal antibodies.
The funding to develop the technique came from cancer research. People hoped it would be a way good way to kill cancer cells. They didn’t had the success with cancers cells that they hoped for. On the other hand molecular biology would be a lot less productive if we didn’t have monoclonal antibodies.
Doing basic research with near infrared lasers and cancer is similar.
That’s false. Even today some cancer patients get cured from their cancer by taking big pharma drugs.
If there’s enough funding for such an idea to make it work in rats in the current system, doesn’t that negate your central point? If people in academia make it works in rats, taking it from working in rats to working in humans is the job of biotech or bigpharma. If bigpharma thinks that such an idea is really promising they could invest billions into the idea and attack the problem systematically.