Scientists used AI to write coherent viral genomes, using them to synthesize bacteriophages capable of killing resistant strains of bacteria.
There are ethical concerns of AIs being used to design viruses that can harm humans. But Kerstin Göpfrich, a biophysicist and synthetic biologist at Heidelberg University in Germany, says that this problem — known as the dual-use dilemma — is not unique to AI, but is always a concern in biology. “I think in research in general you always have a dual-use dilemma. There’s nothing specific about AI, and you can always use progress for the better or for the worse,” she says. The authors addressed biosafety concerns in the manuscript. They say that they excluded viruses that affect eukaryotes, including humans, from the Evo models’ training data. The ΦX174 phage and E. coli host systems they studied were also non-pathogenic and have ”a long history of safe use in molecular-biology research”, the researchers write in the study.
This is not an actual breakthrough. We already have faster, cheaper and more effective ways of doing what they did, with better results. It’s called mutagenesis, it’s dirt cheap and has much better yield than 16 out of 302. Considering they paid 12-16 cents per nucleotide for the synthesis, this was a massive waste of taxpayer money to promote a project based on the buzzword du jour.
Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse…
Great! Lets make something as deadly as bubonic plague and spread as fast as covid! /s
(We’re so gonna die)
That sounds like a newspaper you find in a post-apocalyptic game
Jesus Christ, this is a terrible idea!!
Cheers
Ah shit here we go again.png
Can we just not, ok science? We can’t even get people to take the vaccines we create.
We’ve already created antibiotic-resistant bacteria—but what happens when bacteria evolve resistance to AI?
IMHO a step forward. Designing organisms leads to unraveling some of what nature has hidden so well.
