Improved plumbing

Recent revelation that the side benefits seen in the common Diabetes drug, Metformin (1), to reduce the risk of cancer was due to its ability to affect the mutation rate in somatic cells beneficially by slowing DNA damage, is instructive at many levels. It further reinforces the fact that most modern diseases can be attributed to the wear and tear of the hardware – something that was never designed to hold up for such a long time. Although medicine's battles have largely been against external attacks on the human body with unanticipated non-linear biological effects, we are now entering a regime in which engineering may have to solve medical problems, that are largely endemic and possibly more predictable.

If disease is a hardware issue -  mainly wear and tear from use and the crumbling of the plumbing infrastructure, unable to remove waste from the system at a sustainable rate, then, perhaps we should approach problems with an engineering mindset. Thus far, engineers have been largely focused on the delivery of agents to more specific targets in an efficient and convenient way but it may be time to focus on the repair of systems and the removal of waste by mechanistic means. God's delicate design has been beyond comprehension for humans to manipulate deterministically and they have succumbed to a game of probability and serendipity to solve medical problems. However, if problems are endemic, then they are likely more forecastable and the solutions to them, more systemizable. In this area, humans have been brilliant as they have been making tools for millions of years and mechanical plumbing systems, bit more recently.

Diseases of the body and the solutions to them may be sought by well established engineering techniques, ushering in a regime of mechanistic preventative maintenance at predictable time intervals.

(1) Solving the mystery of an old diabetes drug that may reduce cancer risk. Published: Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - 17:39 in Health & Medicine. Source: McGill University