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Can a Systems Biologist Fix a Tamagotchi?

Here's a great paper that humorously lays out the challenges of reverse engineering.

"Another common inspection tool in biology is gene perturbation experiments. As already mentioned, this technique can provide useful information, but it is also used more blindly, e.g., by deleting in turn every single gene in an organism to see what happens. In software engineering, no one has ever seriously proposed to remove each instruction in a program in turn to see what breaks. One might have a slightly better chance of acquiring useful knowledge by removing all pairs or triplets of instructions, but this immediately becomes unfeasible."
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