If NASA simulate physics (with programming) precisely enough to accurately calculate what will happen when they send a rocket into space, can biologists simulate the human body to discover what will happen when, for example, new medicine is introduced to it?

Question

I was thinking a reinforcement learning algorithm could be a trained in a simulated environment to find a cure for cancer, testing how every which complex process of a new medicine or even nanotechnology might react to its environment. Am I way off?

In: Biology

Answer 1

That would not be practical, or even possible, the human body is probably several trillions of times more mathematically complex than space flight. And I’m probably still lowballing it by several orders of magnitude.

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Additionally, the human body isn’t well understood. We could, by hand, calculate the position of Jupiter at any point in the future for millions of years because we understand orbital mechanics well enough to do that. But we don’t understand the human body well enough for that even if we did have the computing power to model it.