Progress in Biology Is Slow – Here's How We Can Speed It Up
&gt; If we care about blood pressure, for example, why have we not given every drug, at every dosage, every regiment, and in every combination to a mouse and actually seen what happens?<p>One of the answers is hidden behind this question: Ethics.<p>We could make a ton of progress if we started growing humans for lab testing. Then we could run massively parallel tests and get data much quicker. I mean, think about how much we could learn grom the brain if we had a large lab full of humans whose brains we could arbitrarily poke and prod at. Direct access would make us so much faster. But... is this something we will ever want to do?<p>Ethics force us to attack problems of (human) biology indirectly.<p>If we&#x27;re talking about biology in general, though, I think we have made enormous progress in the last  10-20 years. In fact, I don&#x27;t think we are in any way prepared for how accessible DIY biology is becoming.  You can engineer viruses in your basement now. Once gene synthesis can be done in a garage, anyone could engineer anything they wanted (anthrax, ebola, whatever). Progress in biology is accelerating.<p>My guess is that in the future &quot;learning how to live forever&quot; will be seen as alchemy&#x27;s goal of turning lead into gold. In theory, you could slam a bunch of subatomic particles together to do it, but that&#x27;s not really worth doing. We&#x27;ve found other ways to get what we want from nature (shininess, gold color, conductivity, etc.) without using gold. The &quot;living forever&quot; argument also runs very quickly into philosophy (ship of Theseus) and away from biology.<p>I think it&#x27;s much more interesting to consider the biological factories that we&#x27;re building. Directed evolution, CRISPR, BIL Gates, gene drives, etc. We&#x27;re making real headway into playing god.