[ExI] holy grail, batman! computer sim of a cell

spike spike66 at att.net
Fri Oct 29 04:16:51 UTC 2010


 

> ...On Behalf Of spike

> ...There are still a few dragons guarding the holy grail of mathematizing
biology... spike

If we manage to mathematize biology, the progress we make in that field will
completely blow our minds.  If we get even one computer sim of even one
single celled lifeform, that successfully makes actual correct predictions,
it will fundamentally change the nature of that science, and every field of
science eventually.  We will soon recognize that the road to discovery in
all of biology depends on writing a software simulation of that lifeform,
then harnessing the enormous untapped potential of the world's unused idle
computer cycles.  Eventually we could perhaps simulate human tissue cells,
then run a massively parallel computing effort to perhaps discover how to
slow their decay with time, which would revolutionize medicine.  Given
several parallel efforts to sim the various kinds of cells in a multicell
organism, and an enormous network of parallel computers donating idle
cycles, perhaps we could model in software the interactions of cells, and
discover new medications, ones that actually work, by randomly trying
various molecules, running entirely on idle computer cycles.  In that way,
the development of computers would be a perfect example of evolutionary
pre-adaptation.

We are standing on the threshold of a dream.

spike







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