Watson reads papers and develops a model of human biology
I suspect the model is already mostly developed; I believe that’s what the machine-readable biochemical pathways is. We then read the papers to develop a model of how the genes interact with the biochemical pathways.
My impression of how this will work in practice is that we take samples from Harold, and Harold’s tumor Bob, and read their DNA. Harold’s DNA is probably mostly normal, but Bob’s DNA is probably totally crazy, in a fairly unique way. Watson can then query its graph with Bob’s DNA to say “this is how I think Bob works biochemically, and using that knowledge I predict we can kill Bob if we attack this particular pathway.”
(Then we should be able to learn from how the treatment goes, and so on.)
I suspect the model is already mostly developed; I believe that’s what the machine-readable biochemical pathways is. We then read the papers to develop a model of how the genes interact with the biochemical pathways.
My impression of how this will work in practice is that we take samples from Harold, and Harold’s tumor Bob, and read their DNA. Harold’s DNA is probably mostly normal, but Bob’s DNA is probably totally crazy, in a fairly unique way. Watson can then query its graph with Bob’s DNA to say “this is how I think Bob works biochemically, and using that knowledge I predict we can kill Bob if we attack this particular pathway.”
(Then we should be able to learn from how the treatment goes, and so on.)