We are Just Machines

Humans are incredibly complex machines but machines none the less. We came without an owner’s manual but we are slowly piecing one together. None of this sort of news surprises me. For me the last surprising news from the biological sciences was the “real” cloning of sheep (I don’t consider tearing apart a blastocyst to make twins “real” cloning, but technically it is). If you would have asked me or almost any other well trained biologist a week before the announcement I doubt anyone would have said “mammalian cloning is imminent.” Now nothing is surprising to me as scientists exponentially grow our biological knowledge.

Some of you religious types out there will insist that we are not “just” machines but so irreducibly complex that we will never be able to figure out how we work. Well my friends that is just not true. On a small scale we understand how everything works, this protein is modified, that piece of DNA gets turned on and creates a protein which then binds to that protein etc. What we don’t quite understand yet is the exquisitely complex interactions between all of our different parts. There are literally thousands of different cellular bits all interacting in different ways. The same protein can be chemically modified in multiple ways, with each different modification capable of different functions. The scary part is that our knowledge of these interactions is growing at an exponential pace. When I started graduate school in 1992 there was virtually nothing known about these interactions. We knew that signals were traveling from the outside of the cell to the nucleus, but in most cases no idea how. Now we have mapped literally thousands of different signaling pathways and the challenge is figuring out the interactions between these different pathways.

The rapid advancement of our biochemical/molecular biological knowledge will have huge ramifications on our culture. How will the culture or our society change with a 25% increase in lifespan across the board? What if it was 50%, 100%, 1000%? The consequences are enormous, but I fear we have already passed the event horizon on this and it is only a matter of time.