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This is how I will cure cancer. Give or take 12 years.

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Hi, everyone! So if you’ve read through my posts before, you know that I’m a biomedical engineering freshman right now, and I’d like to lay out a very short rationale on how I want to cure cancer.

My understanding of modern medicine is this:

  • More or less, we get how a cell works on a molecular level. We don’t have a perfect picture yet, but we have an accurate enough one to make predictions (hell, that’s how modern medicine has gotten to this point already).
  • We now have the technology that allows us to simulate cells on the molecular level, through the use of concurrent programming techniques. So far, however, we have underutilized this tactic.
  • The problem with modern medicine is that we humans have not adequately developed tools to allow us to grapple with the mind-boggling complexity of a field like medicine. We can’t just do trial-and-error, either, because that’s about the most unethical thing you can do – playing with human lives.

So my approach is to help develop those tools, to deal with that complexity, and the logical next step is to try to make a real-time molecular model of a human cell, and a way to see how it will react to certain molecules being introduced to it.

There’s a science to developing medicines that can pierce, for example, the phospholipid bilayer that wraps around a cell. There’s a science to making medicines that tell cells to spur or inhibit production of certain proteins in the body. And the problem space for these different types of creations is virtually endless.

So I propose a new system: Let’s make a rock-solid, molecular representation of a human cell, and work our way up from there. This is how I will cure cancer, give or take 12 years to get the required knowledge to do so.

If I am successful in representing a human cell, and if Moore’s law holds fast, I will hopefully be able to scale the system up to multiple cells at a time, so that I can see how a medicine will interact with an entire tissue while still retaining the fidelity of its molecular actions. (Again, concurrent programming finds one of its most vital applications in this world.)

So yeah, that’s my idea. Constructive criticism is appreciated, as are offers for help. As in me helping you, or you helping me, whatev’s. Let’s make this cool thing happen, people.



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