P.S. I read your piece a few days ago, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.
At its biophysical core, an uncomfortable question remains: What happens when humans spend decades in environments optimized for economic throughput while losing the regulatory bandwidth their biology evolved to maintain?
When these systems eventually fail, we often engineer, patent, and sell back functions that evolution once provided for free. That is undoubtedly a medical achievement—but it also raises the question of whether we are treating the causes of dysregulation or merely commercializing its consequences.
I can relate to your question so much, especially when I was finalizing this essay at 3 am at night.. because during the day I just don't really have time. Our life is now optimized for performance because, well, survival depends on it, we need money, and the world is getting more and more expensive year by year. There is a tradeoff between living a life that is optimal for biology and regulatory functions (even as trivial as circadian rhythms) and a life that is optimal for "making it in life," so to speak. It is quite hard to find this balance. From all life experiences I have, I just don't believe a "work-life balance" exists, unless you are born into a wealthy family. As someone who came from a very modest family and from a remote post-Soviet location and made it all the way through all the financial hardship and immigration hardship, I can totally say it is impossible to prioritize "healthy lifestyle" in such a scenario. I had to prioritize career and money for decades, sleeping sometimes 4-5 hours (which I still do sometimes), and now, when I have achieved a certain level of life, I can finally afford to take care of my biology, at least to some extent. Healthy diet (not cheap btw), sport, playing padel, recreational activities, travel, and I can sleep for 6-7 hours and sometimes even 8 (can you imagine that?). What I found to be good news is that even starting to care about yourself later in life (beyond 30s) can still be enormously beneficial for health. So, at least for myself, I found that working and studying a lot during my 20s and then focusing on health in my 30s proved to be quite a decent strategy.
Great article! Your metaphor of RNA as a programmable interface is a brilliant piece of systemic critique.
It’s a fascinating paradox: nature perfected this RNA mechanism over billions of years through self-organization. Our cells are naturally built to do this. But looking at how hard it is for so many people today to fight off viral infections, it shows one major thing: our modern, chronically stressed metabolic environment has systematically stripped our bodies of the baseline conditions needed for this ancient system to run smoothly.
Modern biotech has to step in with artificially programmed mRNA from the outside simply because we’ve robbed our internal biology of the bandwidth to manage the code from within.
Thank you for your comment, and yes, we are closer to kind of "programmable" biology interventions like mRNAs than ever... however, bottlenecks remain, and they are still quite hard to overcome. Delivery is one of them, and efficacy in many cases. But I see the really bright future for mRNA technology, I think we are a couple of breakthroughs away from a quite system-level platform that would be applicable to curing many things... terrible things.
P.S. I read your piece a few days ago, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.
At its biophysical core, an uncomfortable question remains: What happens when humans spend decades in environments optimized for economic throughput while losing the regulatory bandwidth their biology evolved to maintain?
When these systems eventually fail, we often engineer, patent, and sell back functions that evolution once provided for free. That is undoubtedly a medical achievement—but it also raises the question of whether we are treating the causes of dysregulation or merely commercializing its consequences.
I can relate to your question so much, especially when I was finalizing this essay at 3 am at night.. because during the day I just don't really have time. Our life is now optimized for performance because, well, survival depends on it, we need money, and the world is getting more and more expensive year by year. There is a tradeoff between living a life that is optimal for biology and regulatory functions (even as trivial as circadian rhythms) and a life that is optimal for "making it in life," so to speak. It is quite hard to find this balance. From all life experiences I have, I just don't believe a "work-life balance" exists, unless you are born into a wealthy family. As someone who came from a very modest family and from a remote post-Soviet location and made it all the way through all the financial hardship and immigration hardship, I can totally say it is impossible to prioritize "healthy lifestyle" in such a scenario. I had to prioritize career and money for decades, sleeping sometimes 4-5 hours (which I still do sometimes), and now, when I have achieved a certain level of life, I can finally afford to take care of my biology, at least to some extent. Healthy diet (not cheap btw), sport, playing padel, recreational activities, travel, and I can sleep for 6-7 hours and sometimes even 8 (can you imagine that?). What I found to be good news is that even starting to care about yourself later in life (beyond 30s) can still be enormously beneficial for health. So, at least for myself, I found that working and studying a lot during my 20s and then focusing on health in my 30s proved to be quite a decent strategy.
Great article! Your metaphor of RNA as a programmable interface is a brilliant piece of systemic critique.
It’s a fascinating paradox: nature perfected this RNA mechanism over billions of years through self-organization. Our cells are naturally built to do this. But looking at how hard it is for so many people today to fight off viral infections, it shows one major thing: our modern, chronically stressed metabolic environment has systematically stripped our bodies of the baseline conditions needed for this ancient system to run smoothly.
Modern biotech has to step in with artificially programmed mRNA from the outside simply because we’ve robbed our internal biology of the bandwidth to manage the code from within.
Thank you!
Thank you for your comment, and yes, we are closer to kind of "programmable" biology interventions like mRNAs than ever... however, bottlenecks remain, and they are still quite hard to overcome. Delivery is one of them, and efficacy in many cases. But I see the really bright future for mRNA technology, I think we are a couple of breakthroughs away from a quite system-level platform that would be applicable to curing many things... terrible things.