We have had a limited view of medical ninjutsu. What looks from the outside like simple flesh manipulation could be sophisticated hacking of limited supernatural tools. But even flesh manipulation mostly guided by chakra can do damage to patients when misapplied. Boosting immune system when the patient has immune disorder. Brining the kidney before repairing the liver as the medical journals stipulate. Oro's MedNin minimum meets the 30 prereq for Biosealing - which could be dependent or capped by med skills - and buff stack limits were put in place partially to stop Orochimaru from having infinite buffs. Doubt he has less than a full stack of buffs.
Bear in mind that a full stack of buffs would cost Oro 500 XP for the combination stunts needed, even if the buffs are all seals/bioseals/stunts and cost no or trivial XP in themselves. He probably hasn't spent that much XP on all of his secondary skills, and I think it's nearly certain that MedNin is at most a Calligraphy equivalent for Biosealing, so it would be a secondary skill.
Bad MedNin resolution makes microscopy more valuable. MS8 was for looking at chakra so does not say much about bio diagnostics. Agreed that there is an unknown pile of biochemical research to slog past. But if MedNin can sense blood sugar, salinity, pH, oxygenation or other measurements with rough granularity it is a head start over historical chemists.
I think you overestimate the utility of light microscopy here. A high-power runic microscope will reveal the existence of cells, nuclei, the nucleolus, mitotic chromosomes ... and that's kind of it, without appropriate staining techniques and extremely good microscopes. Mitochondria are barely visible under a light microscope, and structures like the ER usually aren't visible at all; there are improvements that can be made, but Oro almost certainly doesn't know enough about optics to do phase contrast or anything of the sort, let alone superresolution techniques of the kind you'd need to see mitochondria as more than a slight blur or darker patch on the image. (This is why I mention a non-light-based microscopic viewing rune as potentially dangerous for Oro to invent, because it doesn't suffer the limits of normal light microscopy.)
Besides, even if you understand cells, that doesn't immediately help you much with macro-scale manipulations. You have to get quite some way into cell biology before it starts paying off in terms of benefits to organ or tissue biology; it's not like nuclear fission or something where the moment you discover the process exists its applicability to power generation is obvious. Germ theory has much quicker payoffs, but not in a self-amplifying way to the extent needed for a feedback loop, I think.
Hard to say which steps can be skipped and which cannot. Orochimaru can graft bloodlines onto other ninja. Some bloodlines have strong phenotype differences to study. Eye structure. Shark characteristics. The clan in Mist that detaches body parts. Tbh, first time seeing the term linkage mapping.
Tsunade keeps herself young. We know Orochimaru made octocats, speyeders and the skin farm and has snake biomods, battle speed regeneration + some form of cloning or resurrection. Hard to get a full picture of what level chakra cheats on or where true understanding lets him cheat harder.
True, but this is kind of my point; Oro can already do so much that it's hard to see how more detailed fundamental understanding would help him, at least not of the kind he'd get out of a runic microscope.
(Linkage mapping is a method of placing genes on chromosomes. Genes that are close together on chromosomes tend to be inherited together, because it's less likely that a meiotic crossover event will occur between them; the closer they are, the tighter the linkage. You can use this to map the locations of genes, but only if you have lots and lots of occurrences to study, which means either huge population sizes or many generations. The point I was making is that Oro may be able to see that people with bloodlines have altered chromosomes (if they do), but that doesn't mean he'll be able to tell exactly where on those chromosomes the genes controlling bloodline development are, or do anything with the information even if he did. If they even exist; bloodlines may be inherited throguh a different mechanism.)
Understanding helps with targeting. GUI vs CLI. Cannot double your mitochondria if you do not kow mitochondria exist, bar horrible side effects.
But you can make bioseals that have the effects you'd presumably want out of that, and they're probably actually more likely to give you those effects than doubling your mitochondria. That "bar horrible side effects" is doing a lot of work; I think you'd need a
lot of understanding to make usefully better targeting than chakra does automatically, and until then you won't benefit much (so no feedback loop).
Zoom rune based on the
Scenery Clone Seal Array might be able to do something like this. What distinction makes atoms doom spiral more than chromosomes? Speeds up timelines?
It's not the atoms so much, it's all the other stuff that rune would reveal. A rune that lets you directly observe cellular processes in real time at atomic resolution practically cracks biology wide open; we do not have anything even approaching that in the real world. Using such a rune, anyone with the slightest idea what they were looking at could very rapidly develop a theory of chemistry, biochemistry, and cell biology; with chakra to provide effector tools, they might well be able to get into gene editing and synthetic biology. The main bottleneck would be information processing, because even if you have direct access to its underpinnings biology is still stupidly complicated, so it wouldn't be instant mastery; but it's the kind of thing that might produce the feedback loop you describe.
ninja'd, but I provided a quote.
