If DNA is just a string of letters, could AI learn to read it … or even write it? Bioengineering researcher Eric Nguyen reveals how AI has upended the rules of biology, potentially creating a future where disease is cured with personalized medicine, extinct species are resurrected (Jurassic Park, anyone?) and microbes designed for Mars make interplanetary life possible. Learn more about how the world's first AI-designed CRISPR model successfully edited genes — and what it means for our understanding of life itself.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. When you think about AI literally generating new DNA, does that thrill you or scare you? For bioengineer and genomic AI pioneer, Eric Nguyen, it's a little bit of both.
But for him, the possibilities of unlocking new medicines and curing diseases, among other things, makes it worth the risk. In his talk, he shares how looking at DNA as a language, one that AI can learn to read, write, and ultimately build, will let us fundamentally change biology and life itself.
I've always found it curious how biologists study life. There's this saying, a biologist will learn how a car works by poking at it, removing one part at a time and seeing how it affects the rest of the car. On the other hand, an engineer will learn how a car works by taking it completely apart and rebuilding it.
Take, for example, the Human Genome Project, one of the biggest breakthroughs of the last century, We spent over a decade mapping out all three billion letters of our genome, the complete set of DNA. We thought that once we could read DNA and apply that same principle, poking and dissecting one letter at a time, that we could start eradicating all human diseases.
But instead, we began to realize just how little we actually understood about the true function of DNA. As a researcher, I work on artificial intelligence and trained as an engineer. I learn by building things and understand by creating. Today, I want to share an idea that can fundamentally change how we study biology and life itself.
Instead of just reading and dissecting DNA, we should be generating it. And we can do this by treating DNA as a language, one that AI can learn to read, write and ultimately build. This idea led myself and a team of researchers at Stanford and the Art Institute with a sort of moonshot. Can we generate an entire genome from scratch using AI? build life from the ground up.
Now, I understand the thought of feeding the code of life into a generative AI is both thrilling and perhaps unsettling. But I came to realize that if this was possible, it could unlock some of the most powerful breakthroughs in science and medicine. But I'll be honest. We had no idea if AI could actually generate DNA. In many ways, DNA is like a language.
It has grammar, structure, sort of like sentences and paragraphs that group together to form a story. And these stories are passed down through evolution, generation by generation. For humans, it's been hard to comprehend these stories written in DNA, in large part because of its scale. DNA is extremely long, and yet at the same time sensitive to the smallest mistakes.
Imagine trying to write something the length of 30,000 books in a foreign language, and that when you're off by a single letter, one of billions. This can mean the difference between a healthy person and a person with a life-threatening disease.
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