It's almost as if your undergrad biology gave you just enough information to make assumptions that aren't true?

The medical journals are filled with studies that "should have worked" and didn't.

Heck, there are a ton of studies that "should have worked" that were harmful.

So much for "we're just scaled up molecular machines".

Move fast and break things in human medicine means unethical researchers maim and kill people, often marginalized people. Nazis, Japanese experimenting on prisoners, Tuskegee airmen syphilis experiments, Cincinnati radiation experiments and many others stand as testament to what ambitious unethical scientists will do to further their knowledge and career. Thus we have strict guardrails that slow down how we do things.

I am close with a few folks in medical research and the broken nature of the system and sheer amount of red tape has broken their dreams. It is impossible to get anything done.

There is a difference between "reasonable guardrails" and suffocating progress until it's nearly impossible barring Herculean efforts by multibillion dollar entities. It cannot be understated how badly the current bureaucracy has destroyed medical progress.

We are seeing the same problem with nuclear overregulation result in worse outcomes and more deaths for people globally.

There is real suffering and a human cost, measurable in lives, to slowing down progress - just as there is one for reckless progress.

I don’t disagree but the guy below you wants to grow human shells and try head transplants.

This is why we can't have nice things. I don't (mostly) doubt that poster's good intentions, but it takes only a few people with undirected ideas and flexible morals or empathy to necessitate strict rules around medical research.

good! old, dinosaur like systems need to be forgotten already.

Transplant a few heads and suddenly you never get invited to another Christmas party

2017

https://nationalpost.com/health/worlds-first-human-head-tran...

I maybe wouldn’t put this on my LinkedIn

This comment, more than any other, has sold me on the value of red tape in medical research.

My guess is that you're either a dev or an orthopaedic surgeon, well-versed in managing the machinistic aspects of systems, but with little motivation to go beyond them.

There is decent experimental evidence to demonstrate that we are more than gene expression and the machine analogy you insist on is not a good one for understanding biological systems - see work by Michael Levin, as example.

There is a wider paradigmatic shift underway that moves from thinking about parts to processes. This refocus on relations rather than objects is very important and, for biological systems, points to a fundamentally social/collective aspect to their nature.

The machine metaphor also fails when you can no longer explain how the machine works. This is true in many areas of medicine (e.g. anasthesia) and, while we continue to believe (sometimes with enormous zeal) in the concepts that helped us in the past, we cling to them at the cost of building better understanding.

What you say isn't "wrong", but it is too limited to be a useful guide in asking new questions about things like immunotherapy treatments.

You might be surprised at how little of the body still functions without brain function, well, some bits of the brain, including basic homeostasis and immune system function.

We're not at all trying.

If you toss out the old rule book and provide unlimited funding, it can be made to work.

Yeah, sure. There are probably going to be only a few tens of thousands "unknown unknowns" side-effects but hey, who cares? We will figure them out, we are out of the stone age cave now!