Like why can’t we recreate a synthetic physical body or body part? Like robots have such a hard time walking by themselves without a constrained set of programming and environment? Or that even keeping a heart beating outside of the is hard to do without a big machine to do all the work?
The best way I can explain is like why can’t we recreate the muscles/ Body part very well? Or at least mimic them in terms of function?
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The short answer is that biochemistry is just ridiculously complex.
Here’s an example that every biochemistry student has to learn known as the “[Krebs Cycle](https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2011/09/13/krebs_cycle-46b152fcf30abdad1e42cce4ded6e2d99d00f458-s900-c85.webp)”
This is how our bodies convert the energy from fatty acids, glucose, or amino acids to energy. It involves a repeating cycle of 9 different chemical compounds and multiple places where energy comes out and where the different energy sources can enter.
And this diagram doesn’t include the early steps of how those energy sources get into the Krebs cycle, nor does it include the final steps of how the compounds that come out of the krebs cycle are converted to energy, nor how that energy is converted to useful work.
And layered on top of all that are regulatory systems, so that if you are burning a lot of fatty acids or glucose the body will figure that out and get more of whatever is required out to the bloodstream to keep things going.
There has been an incredible amount of effort done to figure out how all of this works, but there are still a lot of holes and we aren’t close to being able to duplicate it with non-biological systems.
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