Building an android

It is obvious that after some thought and analysis that the system of and basis of common animal life is a kludge system that has evolved to a pinnacle that is likely never to be understood. It might seem unlikely that a person could design a biological system that was better than the one which exists, however it is designed by randomness to be stable over billions of years and the basic framework of the cell is quite capable of sustaining itself for billions of years, as it has. For the purposes of a sentient life a stability over a few hundred years would be adequate for a constructed biology.

In the case of a multicellular organism it has chosen to replicate every element of the genome as that is the only way to have access to parts of the genome in every differentiated cell. It does not have the luxury of knowing which genes will be useful at the end of differentiation or to what purpose it is applied.

The total amount of energy expended because the system is a random evolved design is perhaps 99% of all of the effort to maintain the organism. If immune systems, complete DNA replication, cell death, weak mechanism and many other factors are considered, a designed organism would be viable at one hundredth of the size and still function with the full capability of the animal counterpart.

This makes me think of the "motie watchmakers" of the Larry Niven novel. An intelligent organic device without need or design for defense or propagation would be the most effective tool for space exploration. The contamination of the biosphere with chemicals that derive from mechanical design increases the chaos of the system and has a cost that self replicating molecular devices do not have.

If these designs are created from scripts that define a simple cell which is not self replicating, then it is much easier to design than something like "Synthia" which is a complete and continuous organism that deals with chaos by multiplicity about an attractor and as such is designed for stability over aeons and not for the shell of a thinking android

Many of the diseases that exist will likely never be cured as they exist as unstable points in the design itself. A good analogy IMHO is a computer program which is written with all global variables and that the final design is just generated by changing some part of a working program until it has a new feature and testing it for a while, even if one variable walks on another it becomes a feature of the code and the failures and horrible practices become the code base. A design like that needs to be retired and constructed in a new way with object orientation and efficient algorithms. In the case of the human system design, there are a lot of legacy lines of code and it has to be the most monumental example of spaghetti code I have ever seen.

The study of biology is interesting, but I can determine that it will never be understood well enough to do good engineering with the design in the system where it exists. If it were isolated from disease vectors and parasites, perhaps, but even then it would be a monumental task that might have no value when completed. I would compare it to deconstructing someone's obfuscated code. It might be entertaining as sport, but I would never use obfuscated code in a design system that I expected to work, be maintained, and improved.