It's computational

For a long time, yours truly has thought the cure for cancer centers on understating how our bodies crunch information because cancer, in essence, is a breakdown of this incredibly complex communicative process that keeps us rubes alive 24/7. With this in mind, the approach to solving this wicked problem is finally going in the right direction based on compute power that's increasing at exponential rates as we move further into the 21st century.

The bad old days ...

A FEW YEARS ago Eric Schadt met a woman who had cancer. It was an aggressive form of colon cancer that had come on quickly and metastasized to her liver. She was a young war widow from Mississippi, the mother of two girls she was raising alone, and she had only the health care that her husband’s death benefits afforded her—an overburdened oncologist at a military hospital, the lowest rung on the health care ladder. The polar opposite of cutting-edge medicine. To walk into such a facility with stage 4 metastatic disease is to walk back in time to the world of the unmapped human genome, when “colon cancer” was understood to have a single cause instead of millions of causes resulting in unique variations, when treatment was the same bag of poison, whether you were in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, or Timbuktu. A time without big data, machine learning, or hope.

John Wheeler was right ... it's computational.

Schadt had just started the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai Hospital, and when he heard about the woman in Mississippi, he said, simply, “That’s exactly the kind of patient we take.” By that he meant patients for whom the current standard of care would fail, for whom the future of medicine—one in which supercomputers sift through masses of genetic data for patterns that could lead to new treatments and cures—could not arrive fast enough.

“We’re on this exponential growth curve, where your mind naturally projects all the way into the future, and you think: We’re going to figure this out,” he says. “In the end, we will know what all these cells are doing, what all these perturbations do. The humbling part is that as we are on this growth curve, we are continually struck by the increasing complexity that is revealed.”

In the end, Wheeler eloquently explains what reality is all about.

I, like other searchers, attempt formulation after formulation of the central issues and here present a wider overview, taking for working hypothesis the most effective one that has survived this winnowing: It from Bit. Otherwise put, every it — every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself — derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely — even if in some contexts indirectly — from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes or no questions, binary choices, bits.

It from Bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe - John Wheeler

John Wheeler