Re:Eli Lilly CEO pushes back on Dario Amodei's ludicrous med...
by eesmith on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:51PM
(#50490393)
I believe the comment is in response to "well why didn't I think of that, it's so obvious" -- biologists have been thinking and trying to do this "obvious" approach for decades.
There's a long history of Silicon Valley people thinking they can just bring in their experience and with a bit of Moore's law brute-force their way into miracles.
Lots of Silicon Valley people in the late 1990s thought they could be on the ground floor with nanotechnology design.
The chemist Derek Lowe 10 years ago used the phrase "Andy Grove fallacy" to describe the optimistic vision that data + massive computer power = cure for diseases. "[T]he idea that understanding human disease and its treatments should be pretty much like designing a new chip or writing a new app", quoting the 2015 essay titled "Silicon Valley Sunglasses" at https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/andy-grove-rich-fa... .
Why Grove specifically? He links back to his 2007 essay at https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/andy-grove-rich-fa... : "So I see that Andy Grove, ex-Intel, is telling everyone that the drug industry could use some of that Moore's Law magic. I've noticed that people who spend a lot of time in the computer business often have an. . .interesting perspective on what constitutes progress in other fields, and we might as well appoint Grove the spokesman for their worldview"
There's a long history of Silicon Valley people thinking they can just bring in their experience and with a bit of Moore's law brute-force their way into miracles.
AutoDesk tried this with molecular design. https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_82.html
Lots of Silicon Valley people in the late 1990s thought they could be on the ground floor with nanotechnology design.
The chemist Derek Lowe 10 years ago used the phrase "Andy Grove fallacy" to describe the optimistic vision that data + massive computer power = cure for diseases. "[T]he idea that understanding human disease and its treatments should be pretty much like designing a new chip or writing a new app", quoting the 2015 essay titled "Silicon Valley Sunglasses" at https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/andy-grove-rich-fa... .
Why Grove specifically? He links back to his 2007 essay at https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/andy-grove-rich-fa... : "So I see that Andy Grove, ex-Intel, is telling everyone that the drug industry could use some of that Moore's Law magic. I've noticed that people who spend a lot of time in the computer business often have an. . .interesting perspective on what constitutes progress in other fields, and we might as well appoint Grove the spokesman for their worldview"