Human biology

Tell them what they can do.

Well, when this Noom energy is fully activated and, quote, boiling, the Bushmen are reportedly able to perform feats that completely defy human biology.

They can plunge their hands or even bury their heads directly into roaring fires without sustaining burns.

Into the fire?

But, you know, the problem obviously is not, you know, design the drugs, but actually getting them to humans.

And I think also the challenge is like, yeah, I think the challenge for drug development specifically is that you have to basically observe human biology and see how it works in human biology.

Because the problem is a lot of this stuff is being done, of course, it starts out in silico, kind of like with the simulations and with AI designing it, and then it moves into in vitro.

where it's just like in a test tube or in the lab.

And then finally it goes like pre-clinical where it goes into like mice and things like this.

And all of these sorts of scenarios aren't very representative of what's actually happening in the human biology, right? Like what's actually happening in the human body.

And so, you know, you may see stuff that works really well, like in rats, for example, rats and mice, it's like, You can basically cure cancer maybe in rats and mice, but those drugs may not generalize well to human patients.

And so that's why I think we need to actually be training AI models on clinical data and on human biology.

At the time, it was an independent major.

It was called Human Biology, Health, and Society under the umbrella of nutritional sciences, and it was such a great way to learn the basis of nutrition for the body.

And then when I went to med school, um, after I finished medical school, I did internal medicine residency, which is general, uh, medicine.

For, uh, for those of you who don't know, it's kind of like adult medicine.

Maybe the best tribute we can offer is to keep asking the questions she started asking back when nobody thought a young woman with a notebook could revolutionise science.

From the City University of New York, you heard from Professor of Philosophy, Kristen Andrews, David Lahti, an Associate Professor of Biology and Psychology, Jessica Rothman, the Program Director in Human Biology and a Professor of Anthropology, and the moderator, Mark Hauber, a Professor of Biology and Psychology.

Thank you to the CUNY Graduate Centre for this recording.

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