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Comment by d0lph | Hacker News Reader

Really curious how far are we from being able to simulate the human body's response to drugs/modification.

We are so ridiculously far that it's not really worth thinking about. We're still at the stage of simulating how molecules interact with each other. To work our way up even to the single-cell organism level would be a historic human achievement.

To simulate an entire human body is computationally mindboggling. The number of cells are in the tens of trillions and we'd need to simulate their responses, not just to the drugs we care about, but doing so while "operating" (feeding, sleeping, etc.) the simulated body.

I have no experience in this area, but. Once you get the molecules and their interactions down wouldn't that make all other types of cells easier to produce?

And at a certain point couldn't you just feed the simulation DNA and watch it grow?

It takes supercomputers days to simulate milliseconds of interactions between a million atoms using classical mechanics (ie Newton's Laws, basically a ball and spring model so not even accounting for quantum effects except through very rough approximations in the spring constants). We don't even have an accurate model for water yet.

The oldest code we have is probably ~65 years.

Our genomes are ~1.2B to 3.5B (sexual reproduction and life at all, respectively) years old.

Now imagine trying to patch that codebase in production...

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