Watch Final Hours https://ept.ms/LetsWatchFinalHours Summary: Scientists in the U.S. recently announced that for the very first time, they were able to use AI to create viruses never before seen in nature. Don’t worry, though: these new viruses were designed to target specific strains of E.coli bacteria that have become resistant to natural antibacterials. This development marks a major milestone in the field of synthetic biology, and it opens the door to potential rapid advancements in human healthcare. Maybe these AIs can develop never-before-seen cures to horrible diseases. However, on the flip side, I think after living through the early 2020s ... we can all imagine how this can go horribly wrong. So today, let’s go through the…
What's the common thread connecting AI advances, biological breakthroughs, a preponderance of high-risk-high-reward research, escalating geopolitical tensions and a hollowed-out U.S. public health sector? - They all heighten the risk that one day a lethal human-made pathogen will emerge, either accidentally or intentionally, and we won't be ready for it. Why it matters: The same advances that make this a pivotal moment for medical innovation are intensifying the risk of catastrophic lab mishaps, though how significant a risk is hotly debated by experts. - "It is a very small tweak from trying to target a disease, and making gene therapies to try to target a disease, to turning a virus into something that can be much more detrimental,"…
Researchers are using AI to create new viruses, hoping to find treatments for antibiotic-resistant infections. Is that a good thing? NewsNation's Rich Bodee explains what experts are saying.
The goal of the research is to achieve medical advances, but the technology raises concerns that it could invent dangerous pathogens and cause pandemics.
A Stanford-led research team has used generative AI to design a synthetic virus — the first time artificial intelligence has been harnessed to create a organism that has never been seen in nature. Why it matters: What could go wrong? The big picture: It could be the first step toward the nightmare scenario AI experts have already warned about: deadly pathogens that can't be stopped, because they've been created too quickly for our current surveillance systems to stop them. - The research could also lead to medical breakthroughs, which is the hope of the research team that conducted the study. "The ability of genome language models to generate entire functional genomes has not been tested," they wrote. Driving the news: Researchers…
Scientists trained artificial intelligence on libraries of DNA and then asked the model to create recipes for viral genomes. Sixteen of them were viable, yielding new viruses.
