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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

This is, quite frankly, ridiculous. Yes, computational models do have a place in science and drug discovery, but I don't know anyone in the field who seriously thinks they will reduce the number of animals used in medical research.

If anything, you may see something like the Jevons paradox, where when you increase the efficiency of something (in this case, animals used in medical research), usage actually goes up.

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> If anything, you may see something like the Jevons paradox,

Thank you for that. I think it might help explain why no matter how large my hard drives get I seem to have no problems filling them as the sizes and number of files seemed to increase to keep me constantly upgrading.

As for the lab mice, if we ever do reach the point where models are enough to replace the need for live animals it does open the door for even the most casual experimentation that might be considered too cruel and inhumane to be performed on living creatures. I'm not sure what kind of useful results could come from that kind of research, but at least then it could be explored without moral considerations or causing trauma to the researchers who would otherwise have to become torturers.

That's probably what the beings who are simulating us were thinking.

I don't think it'll happen tomorrow, but computer technology hasn't finished advancing...nor has our medical knowledge. Perhaps within the next century bits will turn out cheaper, faster, and more effective, perhaps even enabled by quantum computing. Biology seems massively parallel, and we've only just gotten started with parallelism in computing.

That literally makes no sense. How exactly would a quantum computer assist us in simulating problems like drug transport and binding? (quite a few problems are purely empirically solved right now) How exactly is biology massively parallel? I suppose you could argue a cell is just a weird form of SIMD but that is a vast oversimplification. We’ve also been doing parallelism pretty much since computers were invented (and even before that, assembly lines were a thing) it’s just that now we really care cause our one trick of shoving transistors in doesn’t work so hot anymore.

A cell is a three dimensional environment where many weirdly shaped things interact with each other. It's not entirely unlike calculating a 3D video game. A quantum computer would assist us similarly as it helps in breaking encryption - it helps you search the problem space for a solution (e.g. protein shape) faster. Genomics is basically statistics.

| Genomics is basically statistics.

As someone in a bioinfomatics Ph.D., yes, there is statistics in genomic, but if you don't understand the underlying biology, you're going to be chasing wild statstical gooses. And even then, we sorta all treat our discoveries as temporary, needing wet lab work to help validate our claims. There's just something you cannot simulate.

I've never met a single person in my life that did or even thought anything worth a damn that wrote off complicated shit in the sort of blasse way people like you do. X is basically Y, why so complicated? It's easy to say everything is easy and simple when you're aware that you won't be contributing shit and more likely will be an annoyance to someone who will.

I didn't mean it's simple at all! but that most work is done using statistics.

> That literally makes no sense. How exactly would a quantum computer assist us in simulating problems like drug transport and binding?

You can use quantum computers to simulate quantum mechanical systems, such as ones studied in chemistry. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1147/JRD.2018.2888987

Indeed, simulating quantum systems was the reason quantum computers were proposed by Feynman in the first place!

I don't know about the state of current tests, but it doesn't seem to me like the author is necessarily proposing to switch left and right to use computer models instead of a real mice.

Instead, the way I'm reading it, they are recommending to use computer models whenever possible, and only resort to live animal testing when the limits of the modelling are reached.

It's a waste of time. There isn't a model that can sufficiently simulate the chaotic behavior of biological cellular systems and the complex interactions with potential chemical treatments. Models are Mickey mouse representations of reality.

There are companies who make money by wasting time like that. I'm no expert in this field but from what I gather sometimes Mickey Mouse Models can help too. Economics is built on such models.

The GDP of an economy can be described in 5 variables. The non-linear dynamic processes like what occurs at the cellular level and at the organism level in a biological system, cannot be modeled with any degree of certainty. The complex chemical interactions of medicines with complex organisms like mice cannot be modeled with any degree of certainty, neither in the short term nor the long term. Uncertainty is an exponential function of time in such systems.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

You can't exactly predict next year's gdp with 5 variables. Retrospective analysis while accepting certain variation of error is another thing.

domain bias much?

It's not completely a waste of time. Animal research is extremely expensive in terms of time, man hours and money[1]. Whatever shortcut you can take to detect ineffective treatments before reaching this stage is arguably going to cost you more time and money than raising a colony of rats for testing your hypothesis out.

[1]: I own 4 (once 5) pet rats. They are only a small colony and, while I love them, I don't keep them at lab standards (for example, I don't a vet sleeping on the couch 24/7 in case of emergencies), yet, in a bad month, I could end up with spending 1000+$ for their health. Now, imagine that for the health standard of lab rats/mice and the numbers required for research.

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