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Microsoft has vowed to "solve the problem of cancer" within a decade by using ground-breaking computer science to crack the code of diseased cells so they can be reprogrammed back to a healthy state.

[...] The researchers are even working on a computer made from DNA which could live inside cells and look for faults in bodily networks, like cancer. If it spotted cancerous chances it would reboot the system and clear out the diseased cells.

Chris Bishop, laboratory director at Microsoft Research, said: "I think it's a very natural thing for Microsoft to be looking at because we have tremendous expertise in computer science and what is going on in cancer is a computational problem.

We're not even near understanding what's going on in normal cells or cancerous ones, so giving people the impression that you've already simulated everything important and you're busy "debugging" it is not only arrogant, it's close to irresponsible.

[...] If you remove the hubris from the Microsoft announcement, though, which takes sandblasters and water cannons, you get to something that could be interesting. It's another machine learning approach to biology, from what I can make out, and I'm not opposed in principle to that sort of thing at all. It has to be approached with caution, though, because any application of machine learning to the biology literature has to take into account that a good percentage of that literature is crap, and that negative results (which have great value for these systems) are grievously underrepresented in it as well.

[...] So if Microsoft wants to apply machine learning to cancer biology, I'm all for it. But they should just go and try it and report back when something interesting comes out of it, rather than beginning by making a big noise in the newspapers. You want to cure cancer? Go do it; don't sit around giving interviews about how you're going to cure cancer real soon now.