[mike_d]

You don't think that the idea could work based on our current understandings. I do not believe that there is anything magical about humans that prevents us from eventually reverse engineering ourselves. To think otherwise is to acknowledge some sort of higher power that holds a special non-organic ingredient in the mix.

To be clear I think this type of work crosses a lot of ethical boundaries. But entire fields like gynecological surgery were the result of a person with no ethics doing horrific things to people without consent. Most early vaccine testing was done on orphans and the mentally handicapped.

This is ultimately what happens when the people who were cheered for "move fast and break things" start to get older and come face to face with the one thing money can't buy.

[idiotsecant]

Reverse engineering complex biological systems is like reverse engineering an LLM. Everythings depends upon and i fluences everything else. There are no clean modular segments, it's spaghetti all the way down.

Biology isn't something you can reverse engineer in its entirety with anything like the technology we have now.

[antonvs]

> I do not believe that there is anything magical about humans that prevents us from eventually reverse engineering ourselves.

Nothing except a possibly unmanageable level of complexity. We don’t even really understand how LLMs do what they do.

Perhaps we can build an AI model that has an understanding of humans down to the level of detail being contemplated here, but that won’t mean we will understand that.

And even with that understanding, it doesn’t mean it’ll be possible to build a fully functioning human body without the equivalent of a brain. It’s likely to be more like a person in a vegetative state - they have a brain and measurable brain function, but no higher cognitive functions that we can detect.

[orwin]

The first vaccine by Pasteur was on a child named Joseph Meister, with the explicit consent if his parents. Generally, the two greatest medical minds of that time (and also, great rivals), Pasteur and Koch, followed the Hippocratic oath (except for themselves).

[nonameiguess]

Not so much "magical," but this kind of comes across like tell me you never studied lab biology without telling me. It's very difficult to cut open all but the most trivial organisms without killing them and there isn't any other way to observe living systems while they're still alive. Observing them while dead doesn't give you near enough information to reverse engineer anything. We've had to solve for the cutting open without killing to be able to do things like open heart surgery, but it currently requires a team of people who trained for at least a decade and consent from the subject who generally isn't going to give that unless their life is already at stake.

If you can indeed just cross ethical boundaries, then sure, but mostly we've managed to purge the Josef Mengele's from societies with the technology to make this kind of thing feasible. The real world is at least not yet The X-Files where shadowy doctors in secret quasi-government consortiums can do basically anything to living humans in the name of discovery.

"Eventually" does a lot of work in your statement in that I completely agree, provided humanity lasts long enough. Give us another ten millenia and I have no doubt damn near every sci-fi scenario ever dreamed up that doesn't require superluminal travel will probably be doable. But that means nothing at all to something trying to launch a business in this century.

[DoctorOetker]

> I do not believe that there is anything magical about humans that prevents us from eventually reverse engineering ourselves.

I agree, and I think we both agree that while it is conceptually possible to reverse engineer most of human biology to the point of eventually understanding how all selection pressures explain the information in the human genome, from your sentence I conclude also that we probably agree that we are far from that position as of today.

> To think otherwise is to acknowledge some sort of higher power that holds a special non-organic ingredient in the mix.

It's not so much a magical ingredient, more than not possessing a manual of the universe, nor guarantees about the distribution of all activities and how humans with specific genomes experience different selection pressures. Our genome only accumulates an effective response for a full history of usual (and now novel) selection pressures, not a description nor the formula describing the dependence on all parameters in the face of selection pressures.

But what I believe the previous commenter refers to is not the question if we ever asymptotically approach this ideal model of selection pressures, but rather that conventional research has already long taught us that healthy body organs require an active life: without exercise the muscles would atrophy like bed-ridden people suffer, and similar for all kinds activities ideally in a mix that is representative of the real distribution of selective pressures.

> To be clear I think this type of work crosses a lot of ethical boundaries. But entire fields like gynecological surgery were the result of a person with no ethics doing horrific things to people without consent. Most early vaccine testing was done on orphans and the mentally handicapped.

Can you kindly link me up with references on the non-consensual gynecological surgeries? I happen to be very interested in the dark origins of medicine in general (since one could argue that healthcare is impossible to socialize, whenever we alleviate the afflictions of genetically inclined sufferers -randomly distributed in all populations- then we simultaneously lift the selection pressure, inducing more of such sufferers in the next generation. One doesn't have to be a Nazi to point that out, and unlike a Nazi (who intervene by castration, genocide, etc.) a scientific moral stance is to simply not intervene: neither oppress nor help.

By what right do we alleviate each type of suffering in a few socialized-healthcare generations at the cost of inducing more suffering in many more future generations to come?

[MandieD]

GP was likely referring to J. Marion Sims, who tested operations on enslaved women who couldn’t meaningfully consent (in an era when there was little or no anesthesia), with some women being operated on over a dozen times, performed ovary removal and clitorectomies on women at the behest of their fathers or husbands to treat “hysteria”, and was a Confederate sympathizer who spent the war over in Europe raising money and seeking diplomatic recognition for it.

He also developed several important surgical techniques and operated on cancer patients at a time when that was considered an absolute waste of time and resources, and that latter thing caused him to lose his position at the hospital he had founded, after which he started the first cancer hospital.