>the trouble comes from the fact that cells are too small, too numerous, too complex to analyze the way a programmer would, say in a step-by-step debugger.
It's like analyzing a Swiss watch if the back was welded on. You could send it though a shredder and analyze the fragments and work backwards to determine the size of the gears. But it's impossible to shred just one watch-- you have to shred a hundred thousand at a time, which are inevitably a complex mix of different watch models each with different minute lengths and hour durations.
Something I have felt is undertaught in introductory biology is how unknown human cells still are! No textbooks wants to list off a thousand proteins with "function unknown" next to them, after all. But to surprisingly large extent it's an undiscovered country. Just in the last few years we're discovering entire new species of RNA! https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/enter-glycornas
It's like analyzing a Swiss watch if the back was welded on. You could send it though a shredder and analyze the fragments and work backwards to determine the size of the gears. But it's impossible to shred just one watch-- you have to shred a hundred thousand at a time, which are inevitably a complex mix of different watch models each with different minute lengths and hour durations.
Something I have felt is undertaught in introductory biology is how unknown human cells still are! No textbooks wants to list off a thousand proteins with "function unknown" next to them, after all. But to surprisingly large extent it's an undiscovered country. Just in the last few years we're discovering entire new species of RNA! https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/enter-glycornas