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Virtual Lab Rat Saves Human Lives
An anonymous reader writes "There is already a Virtual Physiological Human project going on in Europe, to program a simulated human that can serve as a guinea pig, but this National Institute of Health effort to program a Virtual Physiological Rat promises to help humans even more. It's too difficult to simulate humans with algorithms, but the simpler rat physiology can be easily programmed, and by hand-tweaking its virtual genes, these rats-in-an-algorithm can be set up to what-if about interventions that cure human diseases more easily that when simulating humans directly. Long live the virtual lab rat!"
Another advance, to a better tomorrow..today.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sorry, where's the irony here?
I am not a biologist, but why is rat-physiology simpler than human-physiology. Smaller yes, but simpler?
Two great concepts were introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Episode 5x06 The Game. Suckdisk, and medical virtualization of the human brain. Now one of these is one step closer to reality!
I still anticipate the actualization of Suckdisk.
before somebody starts griping that we are abusing these virtual rats?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Virtual Lab Rat Saves RAT Lives...
Not just rats. How about some Fungus, mollusk, reptiles, etc. And lets test various drugs on these vs. the sim. If it matches, then we find out how it matches and not. Far better to get cells down then move to simple tissues and up until we hit complex creatures. And a rat IS a complex creature.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If we create a fully virtual human, is it ethical to subject it to inhumane treatment? We might be able to get away with rats, but how would this work with virtual people?
Not quite the issue here since this is physiological instead of psychological, but it seems to be the next step.
That must be the understatement of the decade. Nothing is easy about simulating a rat, or nobody would use them anymore.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Virtual Peta is going to be all over this.
"What do you mean you just stopped the simulation..."
Can I get a tax break if I donate my dead RPG characters to this medical research?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
We can only simulate what we fully understand; beyond that, we're just guessing. This will do something between 'jack' and 'squat' for testing things like the effect of novel pharmaceuticals. There are too many unknowns when it comes to cellular biology.
Hell, just recently we discovered that removing the spleen caused a significant increase in diabetes; turns out that spleens create islet cells. We didn't know that. I'm skeptical of the usefulness of models that contain so many unknowns. Hell, we're lucky if we can get the relatively simple problems of fluid dynamics working accurately enough to model windflow over a single, simple object; we still cannot model it with any kind of accuracy on complex objects that move with the wind (for example, a tree or a towel flapping in the breeze). And that's just engineering! We have extremely precise and accurate ideas for how pressure, friction, temperature and deformation affect windflow individually, but when you put it all together, it becomes impossibly complex.
When you're talking about a system where we don't even know all the rules? And is unfathomably more complex?
Sorry, I'm not convinced.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
... but is actually crap. It is however a great way to get funding from people who have no idea that the complexity of a rat is the same as a human.
Also, biology is unpredictable, you won't find new stuff using these simulations, You will find new stuff that you then need to test... and you may miss stuff that would have shown up in tests.
Systems biology is half science, half bogus and 90% waste of money.
A virtual lab ray is an animal that, if killed in sufficiently many and creative ways, will generate a PhD.
simulations can only be accurate if we understand the entire system, in this case it's a rat. when we fully understand how a rat works down to the atomic level THEN we can make a proper rat simulator. however, by that time we will have discovered how to do the same with humans.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
the effort looks very worthwhile and may well be quite helpful, ie PROMISES... but the notion that rat physiology is EASILY programmed is so ridiculous as to be laughable. Perhaps some broad, gross strokes, which might be good for some things, but certainly not in any detailed, thorough way at the level of subtlety that many disease operate at. And yes, rat physiolog is very similar to human physiology, certainly at these levels and below. When the genome is 90+% identical, so is the physiology.
If they can use the simulation to keep real rats from experiments, then the virtual rat is saving the lives of real rats before any humans are affected.
I propose a special moderation line in the pulldown with the value of -2 for usage of the line "Saves Human Lives"
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Approximations got man to the moon.
Pfft. What good is a rat emulator without a good place to get ROMs?
Sleep is futile.
According to some research, parts of the living mechanisms can only be understood if we take into account quantum physics, hence the fallacy of this simulated rat.
Lets start with something way simpler, like modelling a single cell ... if model's correct (that is, if the chemical dogma in medical science is the right one), then we can move uphill to amoebas; else, we have a nifty scientific addition to knowledge, along with added problems for simulating living things.
But I suspect the simulated rat ambition is way over our present knowledge of its working. Surely some dumb-ass politician thinking that the biology of animals is fully understood, and that only the Mighty Computer (think religion's god in their understanding) can lead us somewhere.
Lacking understanding of biology : checked
Lacking understanding of computers : checked
Here is politician 2.0
from Virtual PETA.
To clarify the summary, the virtual rat project is being done at the Medical College of Wisconsin (Milwaukee). NIH is just funding the project.
This type of projects is not particularly known to be cheap. Supercomputers are expensive and cost quite a bit just to have them powered and maintained
On the other hand, it's a parallelisable, and scale nicely with processing power (like number of nodes on the cluster or Moore's law and newer CPU/GPU).
You could use the virtual model to test not 2 chemicals - like GP mentionned - but tens of thousands of candidate.
It's currently done at the molecular level: You can throw a database of thousands of molecule and a bunch of know 3D structure or a bunch of chemicals for which we know precisely how much each is efficient. And see what sticks. And thus have an idea of possible candidates which could then be investigated in a real lab.
Now it's possible to do it for the physiology :
Run a database of tens of thousands of substances for which the receptor binding and effects are known, through physiology simulators. Find candidate with promising solution, confirm only those in a wet lab.
Scanning through the same collection of substances using real rats would require using several hundreds of thousands of rats. It's a logistical madness. And the ethical board won't be happy about it. No to mention PETA's reaction to the fact that half a million of rats are sacrificed in order to find a couple of interesting substances among a thousand. At this point, running simulations on an expensive cluster starts to make sens.
Simulation make it possible to consider much larger collection of substance than if you had to use real rat to find which are promising.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]