Causal Human Biology Is All You Need. But How Much Do We Know? (Part 1)

Part 1: What human genetics of lipids and psychiatric disease teach us about the answer to: What fraction of causal human biology do we actually know? I have been asking a version of this question for months now – at lunch, over dinner, on walks with friends and colleagues. For fun, I have gotten into the habit of politely pressuring people for a single number. Come on, just give me your best guess! Almost without exception, as we worked through the answers together, we did not land on a single number. Instead, we debated a structure. This blog is an attempt to write that structure down. Every one of those conversations eventually ran into the same unexamined assumption behind most discussions of AI and drug discovery: that we already understand causal human biology well enough for a sufficiently capable model to find the cures hiding inside it. If that assumption is right, as many with computational or technology backgrounds seem to believe, the job left for AI is largely one of…