2 replies to this topic

[betterfuture]

Hi everyone, I was hoping to create a discussion and brainstorm about health/ brain/ aging research and would appreciate input from anyone who has a good understanding about how the research process works, how it's funded, who are the key players, and most importantly, why can't progress happen faster. 

 

I suffer from a rare iatrogenic life changing condition that has no cure and is not well understood and have always been disheartened by how little we know about the brain and the complex processes of the body but I think that could be about to change. Recently there has been a lot of hype in AI which has prompted me to do some digging into the space over the last few months. It turns out that the people who are in the space and working on AI are mostly convinced that we are on the verge of huge breakthroughs due to the exponential nature of the progress. Some of these breakthroughs we are already seeing. This is a perspective that I now share.

 

I believe that each of us will have a PhD level agent with expertise in any field we choose in our pocket within the next 5-10 years. This agent would have the ability to identify gaps in knowledge, propose research, design experiments etc. There's a paper about how this kind of thing is already happening which you can find if you google "Chemcrow: augmenting large language models". I think I'm being conservative in this prediction, there are many who believe we will have artificial super intelligence within 10 years. 

 

Here's where I'd appreciate guidance:

 

If in the future, be it near or far, the cost of intelligence is dramatically reduced and accessible to all, what would be the remaining bottlenecks and hinderances to rapid progress in our understanding of the body and disease? ie. if the average person was now able to become an expert in their disease and what needed to be done to further scientific understanding, what would be stopping them? 

 

What are the main time constraints and costs in research? 

 

How does the research process work roughly and who are the key players other than PhDs and researchers?

 

Why is research slow and how might that change with AI? 

 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

 

 

[Mind]

There are a lot of possible ways to engage the research community and hopefully you will get some good discussion here.

 

For starters, I would say you should just get a subscription to Chat-GPT. I think it is only like $20 per month. It is already quite powerful. You can ask it questions about your condition. It can summarize all the current knowledge and possible treatments. We could discuss the results here in the forum and find a positive way forward.

[Thunder56]

Majority of research in the US is funded by a National Institute of Aging. You can subscribe to the newsletter, which describes the latest funding opportunities. There has been outstanding growth on funding over the past 10 years in Alzheimer's research, which lies at the intersection of accelerating neuroscience in the context of aging. In fact, one of the major programs is called the Accelerating Medicines Partnership in Alzheimer's disease (AMP-AD).

To get a feel for the possibilities related to generating big data to train AI, I would recommend the recently published book by Drs. Leroy Hood and Nathan Price. I believe the title is "The age of scientific wellness."

Since I'm a bit of cheapskate with limited ability to absorb detail, I prefer staying at the 10,000 foot view. So I haven't read their book. But I've listened to their talk online and I visited the non-profit website, (phenome health dot org) to read their vision statement. There are website is as good place to start as any, but if you want to dive deeper, I recommend going to their publications list. I started with the Scientific American special issue.

If you really want to get a better sense of science at the cutting edge, I recommend visiting the Institute of Systems Biology website. I believe you can find descriptions of a few powerful data analysis tools under development for making sense of some parts of complex interacting biological systems related to health, aging, and disease, including those related to cognition.