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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

When you think about what the genome encodes, you have to appreciate the finely tuned timing and signalling of developmental biology. As development progresses, cell populations split off and take on different forms, functions, biochemistry, and gene regulation to fit their new purpose.

Our bodies differentiate cells into different lineages precisely when it is developmentally necessary. You don't want to turn the clock in reverse. That's a disease state and a hallmark of cancer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_lineage

On the subject of developmental biology, this is a really fun image if you aren't familiar:

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~pine/book1qts/embryo-compare.html

View on HN

>> You don't want to turn the clock in reverse. That's a disease state and a hallmark of cancer.

Well, you actually do want to turn the clock in reverse. That's a hallmark of the highest so far methodology standard in science: if you want to position that you gained a full understanding of an object, you need to be able to reverse engineer it both in space and time. Many cancers contain senescence associated secretory phenotype (SASP) and senolytic drugs have been researched to be able to neutralize cancer cells as well as senescent cells.

You do want to turn the clock in reverse, only maybe not the whole way back to the embryonic state, but a couple of formal years or decades back to reset the epigenome, and this is exactly what David Sinclair, Vittorio Sebastiano and many others are undertaking now.

“That's a hallmark of the highest so far methodology standard in science: if you want to position that you gained a full understanding of an object, you need to be able to reverse engineer it both in space and time.”

We can’t even do this with simple black box game playing AIs, so a new paradigm may be needed.

Oh, with AI game players, can't you just insert a print statement in code to simultaneously log all weights' changes and their accompanying changes in performance etc in a file and get another AI like some multi-parameter regression to search for correlations in it?

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