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As a coder, I'm realising more and more that the human body isn't so different from a computer. When you try to fix something without having complete understanding of all the relevant parts of the system, you will invariably introduce new issues. With a machine as complex as the human body, it seems inevitable that the field of medicine would be a game of whac-a-mole. Finding solutions which don't create new problems is hard and should not be taken for granted.

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kylehotchkiss 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Add on that there is no complete understanding of this system with all the Unknown Unknowns etc and you can see why we should test this stuff better before letting hims.com just disperse it across the american populace

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moduspol 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Perhaps--though worth keeping in mind that the overwhelming alternative is just lifelong obesity, along with all the negative impacts from that.

At least at a societal level, some increased rates of pancreatitis and a little suboptimal muscle loss are peanuts compared to what high obesity rates do to people at scale.

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jongjong 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes 100%. That's why I never understood the rollout of MRNA vaccines during COVID. It's like pushing a massive code change straight to production during peak traffic and without the normal phased rollout. I totally understand where conspiracy theorists are coming from. That didn't seem right.

	▲	UniverseHacker 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It made sense to me- they made a risk vs benefit decision under high uncertainty, factoring in the massive harm that the ongoing pandemic was already causing. There had already been 12 years of human clinical trials for other mRNA vaccines, and they still did extensive clinical trials for the new covid vaccine before rolling it out. In hindsight they were exactly right- and they saved at least tens of million of lives by acting quickly[1]. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9537923/
	▲	kylehotchkiss 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		yeah, it's too bad the tech didn't have a better way to gain peoples trust (through some other breakthrough with the normal set of clinical trials). I think the solve was impressive (tell cells to produce a protein that looks exactly the same as the viruses and place it outside the cell to piss off antibodies) but protein-protein interaction data is hard to come by. Maybe these guys can figure it out https://www.aalphabio.com

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GauntletWizard 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A computer is much more likely than your body to have small, self contained parts that just function. Your body is the result of millions of years of accidental evolution - See the canonical example of the laryngeal nerve in a giraffe. Computer programs are often designed to be small and modular. They might have to worry about memory layout shifting because some other program grew - That's nothing like your spleen trying to occupy the same physical space as your stomach and causing digestion issues.

For all of medical science's experience and history with debugging the human body, there's still so much more to understand.

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ben7799 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I like the analogy that biologists are making code changes (especially with genetic therapies) without actually understanding the machine code specification or even having a copy of the source code.

It's like a hacker flipping bits in a binary trying to figure out what's going to happen.. except the hacker at least can look up the complete machine code.

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akira2501 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yea, except without error checking, and fully analog technology.

Although, "single cosmic ray upset events," are just as devastating.

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UniverseHacker 5 days ago | parent [-]

There's tons and tons of error checking- we have at least 5 different error correction and repair systems in DNA, cell cycle checkpoints, and extreme redundancy and feedback homeostasis at nearly every level. Every individual cell has it's own 4 copies of almost every critical gene- two of each chromosome made up of two strands of DNA each. Human bodies can function 70+ years, sometimes with no medical care- something no computer or man made complex machine comes close to.

Beyond specific diseases we understand, it's still mostly a total mystery why we aren't immortal- we have not yet identified what is the basic mechanism of aging, or why it happens at different rates in different species, and mostly our systems are fundamentally capable of repairing and regenerating almost anything, but for some reason get worse and worse at doing so over time. Moreover, this doesn't seem to happen in all organisms- there are many animals that live ~4x human lifespans, and at least one species of jellyfish that is biologically immortal.

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akira2501 5 days ago | parent [-]

Redundancy is not error checking. The "error correction" mechanisms are actually just "proofreading" mechanisms and are almost entirely local and centered around transcription. Common mode errors are harder to induce due to the plain redundancy of DNA pairs but also not impossible, and once induced, are impossible to locally notice or correct. In some cases the "error correction" machinery is the cause of these induced errors. The result is genetic disease and/or cancer and is a case of missing error _checking_. Perhaps my definition was exceptionally parsimonious.

> with no medical care [...] something no computer or man made complex machine comes close to.

That's because we get far more units of "work" out of our machines than the person living for 70 years with "no medical care." Some people live just 30 years with no medical care too. And the machine does not need to sleep. We eat food they eat lubrication oil. I don't think this was a good analogy.

> it's still mostly a total mystery why we aren't immortal

While we haven't pinpointed the mechanism, we have a pretty good idea of why, and where in the system we should be looking for the answers.

> but for some reason get worse and worse at doing so over time.

You are a living Ship of Theseus and these "error correction" mechanisms are not perfect. Aside from this there are known genetic disorders which alter the rate at which people age. This is not nearly as mysterious as you're making it out to be.

> there are many animals that live ~4x human lifespans

And what are their resting respiration rates?

> and at least one species of jellyfish that is biologically immortal.

In theory. We haven't found an immortal one yet. They all die. They're also nowhere near our level of biological complexity or capability.

	▲	UniverseHacker 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Redundancy is not error checking Yes, you are right that DNA repair mechanisms are not technically error correction in the sense that the term is used in computer memory and storage, where any isolated error is mathematically guaranteed to be correctable. You clearly have a bio background, but my intent was to point out in a simplified way to non-bio people that biological systems do have mechanisms to deal with errors. I incorrectly assumed that you didn't have a bio background, and I can see that my message would have seemed a bit condescending- my apologies. > While we haven't pinpointed the mechanism, we have a pretty good idea of why I study metabolism and have observed things that aren’t compatible with any of the leading theories- which I suspect are all dead ends. We are definitely missing something big still. In particular, I feel like the big anti-aging startups are throwing good money after bad, by massively funding researchers with mostly played out dead end ideas. Tech billionaires funding this stuff are re-playing the same scenario as the ancient Chinese emperors and their mercury based elixirs of immortality in modern times IMO.