Life of a Lab Rat

The video I mentioned yesterday reminded me of what I really want to see come out of all this sciencey stuff. There are vast quantities of data coming out of labs around the world, both 'big science' and 'little science'. The trick is to tie it all together, so that it makes some kind of sense. The second trick is to present it.

It is going to take a while, and some serious thinking about interdisciplinary communication, but I hope that within the next twenty five years or so we will have a working in silico cell. A program that models in exquisite detail the complete (OK, maybe 90% — 'first draft') secret life of any given cell type. Computing power will not be a problem, we will in all likelihood have something smaller than a handheld that can cope with it. But imagine, taking a computer model of a leucocyte, giving it some P-selectin and letting the program run. Or changing random proteins to see if they behave as oncogenes. In time we would catalogue all this information but being able to predict cellular behaviour from a rigorous theoretical background would be incredible.

Imagine it as a teaching tool, too. Build — or use holographic technology to project — a 10 metre spheroid, crowded and swarming with life; walk inside it and follow individual pathways and processes. (Take Australia. Scale it down until it fits across the length of your hand. That scale — inverted of course — is the same order of magnitude as your typical animal cell blown up to 10 metres across).

By 2030? Possibly. I'm not making a prediction, I'm trying to inspire. I think we could do it by then, given the phenomenal increases in both biological knowledge and computing power over recent years.

And then . . . scale it up. Refine the models. Build faster, smaller computers. Collect and analyse and present more data. In a similar way that linkage maps were used as the framework to build the human genome, take the Visible Human project and fill in the blanks. Take the virtual cells, build virtual tissues, virtual organs and finally a complete, 'virtually' functioning in silico human. Not just anatomically but biochemically correct.

A computer model that you can present with a candidate anti-cancer agent, and ask and answer the question "what does this chemical do?". No more animal testing, no more clinical trials; just a computer program. Not just retrieving data but actually working out from physicochemical principles the physiological response to anything. Oh yes, it will take a lot of work, we will need a much deeper understanding of pharmacogenomics (and lots of other -omics) and an imperial shedload of public money, but wouldn't it be worth it?

Let's say it will take another 25 years after the Human Cellome First Draft. I have a chance of being around to see it.