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drethelin comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90 - Less Wrong
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you're uh, assigning just a tad too much power to the average biochemist.
Professor Evans-Veres is at Oxford, so he's probably a well-above-average biochemist.
Bear in mind that the question isn't "can top biochemistry professors help stop/undo death" -- it's "can a high-end biochemist be of help, if you can do magic and rearrange matter at the molecular level." And that seems relatively plausible.
you're uh, assigning just a tad too much power to the well above average biochemist.
More seriously, I think Harry's path here is much more magic than bio focused. He's seen memories removed and copied. If he can figure out how to remove ALL the memories from a body, and if he knows the obliviate charm, and if dead cells work for poly juice (which they should since hair is dead) then he has a decent path using only minor variants to known magic.
But the way memories are stored in Pensieves, all they provide is a firstperson video feed of things that have happened. That's not enough information to make up a whole person.
Is it first person video, or first person full sense feed (including sound smell, feel of the chair etc.)? Because if its a first person full sense feed, plugging that into human brains is how we get people right now.
If you push the same feed into a brain, you might get the same person at the end. I'll note that the Mr. Bester storyline makes a point of showing how reproducible thoughts are given the same conditions.
Hair isn't even cellular. Given that it can be cut off and used, follicles are not required.
Wouldn't it be a good idea to at least ask? Professor E-V might not have ideas, but he would have contacts at Oxford where he/Harry could find other ideas. The downside is that, by involving the non magical world, his family and those contacts will become bigger targets. And I suspect Harry would be loathe to expose them with an unknown enemy with largely unknown capabilities.
Getting his father (or just about anyone) up to speed enough to be able to help within the six hour window seems unlikely. The problem isn't motivation.
Could you propose a specific way that a high-end biochemist can help with the condition in which Hermoine happen to be?
At least he is someone with something resembling medical training, which is some big potential to help, since harry wasn't even clear on how to use a first aid kit.
At first I thought that Harry just sitting there was counter-productive, but then I remembered they probably wouldn't let him kidnap muggles even for a night. However his father would be brought in promptly if Harry asked that.
Also I tried to do some fact checking while typing this, but it turns out new chapters had come out (so I'll drop this and go read them instead).