Key Takeaways
- In a new study, researchers showed that they could use AI to design 16 functioning viruses not found in nature.
- The new research fuels concerns that AI could one day create a new category of biological weapons, such as deadly poisons or viruses, that pose a threat to humanity.
- The viruses created by AI weren’t harmful to humans — they were all similar to another virus that occurred in nature and could only infect bacteria.
For the first time, researchers have tapped into AI to design brand-new viruses, according to a new report from The New York Times.
This advancement could one day give scientists new ways to study diseases and develop treatments. But it also raises concerns that someday, similar technology could be used to manufacture biological weapons, such as deadly poisons or viruses.
Scientists have been able to build viruses in laboratories for years. They can copy a virus’s genetic code, or the biological instructions that tell it how to work, to study vaccines, antiviral drugs and the viruses themselves.
But in this new study, published recently in the journal Science, researchers did more than copy something that already exists. Scientists at Stanford University and the Arc Institute trained an AI system to study the patterns found in DNA, the material that carries genetic instructions in living things.
The AI then used those patterns to write instructions for creating new viruses. The researchers turned those instructions into real DNA and placed it inside bacteria.
The bacteria then produced viruses that had never existed in nature. These viruses could infect other bacteria, showing that they were able to function. However, the viruses created by AI weren’t harmful to humans. They were all similar to another virus that occurred in nature and could only infect bacteria.
How the AI works
The study focused on an AI model called Evo, which is like ChatGPT. While ChatGPT relies on training on vast amounts of text, Evo functions with knowledge of genetic sequences gathered from millions of viruses, animals and plants. Altogether, scientists trained Evo on nine trillion genetic sequences.
Evo first learned how living things’ genetic code tends to work. It looked for patterns shared by many different organisms, then used those patterns to come up with ideas for new genes.
That made the researchers wonder: Could Evo do something much bigger? Instead of creating just one gene, could it design the full set of instructions for an entire virus?
They started with viruses because their genetic instructions are much smaller and simpler than ours. The human genome has more than three billion DNA “letters,” while many viruses have only a few thousand. The team focused on a virus called Phi X-174, which scientists have studied for nearly 100 years. It infects only E. coli bacteria, not people, so similar viruses were considered safe to work with.
After studying Phi X-174 and related viruses, Evo was asked to create its own versions. It came up with about 700,000 possible designs. The scientists picked the 285 that seemed most likely to work, made the DNA for each one and put those DNA instructions into bacteria growing in petri dishes.
Most of the designs did nothing — the bacteria simply kept growing. But in some dishes, the researchers saw clear spots appear in the cloudy layer of bacteria. Those spots indicated that viruses were multiplying and killing the surrounding bacteria.
In the end, 16 of Evo’s designs produced new, working viruses.
“This is an important milestone,” Patrick Cai, a biologist at the University of Manchester who was not part of the study, told the Times.
Key Takeaways
- In a new study, researchers showed that they could use AI to design 16 functioning viruses not found in nature.
- The new research fuels concerns that AI could one day create a new category of biological weapons, such as deadly poisons or viruses, that pose a threat to humanity.
- The viruses created by AI weren’t harmful to humans — they were all similar to another virus that occurred in nature and could only infect bacteria.
For the first time, researchers have tapped into AI to design brand-new viruses, according to a new report from The New York Times.
This advancement could one day give scientists new ways to study diseases and develop treatments. But it also raises concerns that someday, similar technology could be used to manufacture biological weapons, such as deadly poisons or viruses.
Scientists have been able to build viruses in laboratories for years. They can copy a virus’s genetic code, or the biological instructions that tell it how to work, to study vaccines, antiviral drugs and the viruses themselves.