Modeling the human body in Rust so I can cmd+click through it
I started this trying to understand two things: why my Asian friends turn red after drinking, and why several friends all seemed to have migraine clusters. I was reading medical papers and textbooks, but kept getting lost jumping between topics. I thought: what if I could just Cmd+Click through this like code? What if "ALDH2 gene" was actually clickable, and took me to the variant, the phenotype, the population frequencies? So I started modeling human biology in Rust with my Ralph agent (Claude in a loop, ty ghuntley). Turns out the type system is perfect for this. Every biological entity is…
Modeling the human body in Rust so I can cmd+click through it launched on October 10, 2025 with 46 votes, #425 of 8,178 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
This project models human biology in Rust, enabling interactive exploration of medical concepts through clickable links between genes, variants, phenotypes, and population data. Built for anyone trying to understand how biological systems work—from students to researchers investigating specific traits or conditions—it uses Rust's type system to enforce relationships between biological entities. The project includes 13 organ systems, genetic variants with ancestry-specific data, and clinical pathology models, generated largely through AI-assisted coding.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Open Human Ontology: A collaborative project to build a comprehensive, open, and structured human ontology for research and applications in AI and knowledge management. - lantos1618/open_human_ontology
A Rust library of cited, testable physiology models — closed-form formulas and small ODE simulations. Each example binary is tied to a published model; each numeric parameter carries a citation; each test asserts a literature reference range. See VISION.md for scope and non-goals. The 2026-04 cull removed eight uncited organ-system scaffolds (immune, endocrine, digestive, sensory, integumentary, reproductive, muscular, lymphatic) and ~50K LOC of typed-but-empty struct hierarchies that no L3 example reached and that carried no citations. Per VISION's quality bar: if a number cannot be cited, the function does not ship. git clone https://github.com/lantos1618/open_human_ontology cd…from github.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
I started this trying to understand two things: why my Asian friends turn red after drinking, and why several friends all seemed to have migraine clusters. I was reading medical papers and textbooks, but kept getting lost jumping between topics. I thought: what if I could just Cmd+Click through this like code? What…
Does a similar job
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