Cancer is just a software platform problem: Microsoft will ' solve ' cancer within 10 years by ' reprogramming ' diseased cells

A short post.Hand a computer scientist a computer and some genetic data, and the world then becomes a deterministic, binary place:Microsoft will ' solve ' cancer within 10 years by ' reprogramming ' diseased cellsSept. 20, 2016Sarah Knapton, Telegraph science editorhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/09/20/microsoft-will-solve-cancer-within-10-years-by-reprogramming-dis/Microsoft has vowed to “solve the problem of cancer” within a decade by using ground-breaking computer science to crack the code of diseased cells so they can be reprogrammed back to a healthy state.Chris Bishop, laboratory director at Microsoft Research, said: “I think it’s a very natural thing for Microsoft to be looking at because we have tremendous expertise in computer science andwhat is going on in cancer is a computational problem." What is going on in cancer is a computational problem " sounds like a form of cybernetic scientism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism) in this sense:Scientism ... is a term that is used, often pejoratively, to denote a border-crossing violation in which the theories and methods of one (scientific) discipline are inappropriately applied to another (scientific or non-scientific) discipline and its domain. We are only scratching the surface in genomics, and to state it is merely a " computational problem " as if biology worked like a deterministic, binary digital computer is, in my mind, wishful thinking.It would be great if genetics were j...
Source: Health Care Renewal - Category: Health Management Tags: determinism Microsoft scientism Source Type: blogs