Its important to understand, when anyone says "cure cancer", they are saying cur...

ChuckMcM · on Aug 15, 2017

I see it a bit differently, if you can figure out both all of the functional relationships in our bodies and devise a mechanism to precisely drive any and all of them, not only will you 'cure cancer' but you will be able to cure any other disease or ailment that is expressed as an undesirable functioning of that system.

I don't know if you can do that with $20B but I feel these days that its more likely to occur rather than the opposite (which is to discover some underlying uncertainty principle that would prevent directing cellular action in a predefined way.)

theobon · on Aug 15, 2017

We are barely able to simulate a simple reptile brain and you are asking for complete understanding and simulation of any human body. I think you are vastly underestimating the complexity of biological system.

ehsanu1 · on Aug 15, 2017

What's the project for simulating a reptile brain? I know we've not fully nailed the ~1000 cells required for simulating a whole worm, though we're getting there: http://www.openworm.org/

mikeyouse · on Aug 16, 2017

> I don't know if you can do that with $20B

You can't.

The NIH budget is ~$30B/year and we don't know the basic mechanism of action for many of the drugs we currently rely on to treat disease. It turns out biochemistry is pretty complicated.

maxerickson · on Aug 15, 2017

I'm not sure a it follows that a perfect understanding of how our body functions leads to a cancer switch.

Mostly because cancer tends to be associated with dysfunction and it isn't necessarily the case that dysfunction can be externally corrected.

ChuckMcM · on Aug 15, 2017

Here is how I reason to my conclusion;

We know that every cancer is the result of a genetic change in the cell DNA which disables apoptosis (cell death).

We know that we have a system in our bodies that is tasked with destroying cells with damaged DNA. (our immune system)

We know that when the immune system attacks cancer cells, it reliably removes the cancer from our systems.

What we don't know is how to reliably program, and deprogram, our immune systems on demand. If we knew both exactly how the immune system programming system worked, and could build tools to enable us to use that knowledge to actually program or deprogram our immune cells ...

Then we would be able to cure all cancers and autoimmune disorders.