Posted: Sep 27, 2011 8:04 pm
laklak wrote:"Computer simulations". Lol. How many people here have every actually designed and written a complex software system? I don't mean some web app or DB mining system, I mean a real, live, multiple-linked-mainframe, thousand-man-year system? If you have ever managed (or even participated in) a project of that scale you would never, in 10,000 million years, trust your life to a drug trial conducted in a simulated environment. We can't keep fucking Facebook up and running on a daily basis, let alone model an incredibly complicated biological system that we don't even fully understand. It's utter nonsense, complete bullshit.
There is no system out there and no system on the horizon that will do that. How in the world can we do anything of the sort until we understand, down to a molecular level, exactly what the human body will do under any given set of inputs? FFS we don't even know how most of the medicines we use every day actually work. We have no clue. Just look up common drugs in the Physician's Desk Reference - I'll wager you will be stunned at the number of entries that say something like "the exact mechanism is unknown".
It's a scam, hokum promulgated by people and organizations with a political ax to grind.
I HAVE!
I would like to say too, that, despite my love of Computers and my own confidence in them, I agree entire with Laklak's statement. I know someone who was the lead programmer for a large medical research firm. As they put it: "The number one rule of biology is no matter how well you plan out your experiment, how carefully you track your parameters, and how you set it up; an organism will do whatever it damn well pleases". Even random number generators aren't (the best you get is a time-based algorithm that mashes up the numbers enough to produce seemingly random results). Enough said on how well Computers can simulate things here.