It's only "insulin" and "cells" for someone interpreting the program. The issue here is that if you had a simulated brain, what makes that simulation a brain for the computer such that it would be conscious?

Here's Jaron Lanier on the issue of consciousness and computation: http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html

He's meteor shower intuition pump is similar to the argument that nations should be conscious if functionalism is true. The reason being that any complex physical system could potentially instantiate the functionality that produces a conscious state. It's also similar to Greg Egan's "Dust theory of Consciousness" in Permutation City.

If one is willing to bite the functional bullet on that, then you can have your simulated consciousness, and the universe may be populated with all sorts of weird conscious experiences outside of animals.