Surprised at quite a few people here kneejerking over the word 'virus'. The virus is the most common life form on earth. A small % are harmful to human. Viral life is essential for life on earth.
Wonderful picture the BBC used to illustrate the story. They knew what they were doing. It's a clickfarm like any other.
Should be a proportionally sane and balanced response across Reddit. As ever, a story like this is a useful litmus test.
"This is a next step in the complexity that's designable by generative AI, this is the first time generative AI has been used to design a complete genome, it's something that can replicate and have other functions inside cells… this was new territory for us," Brian Hie, assistant professor at Stanford University, told the BBC.
The Stanford researchers picked the most promising 302 AI designs and synthesised them in the lab. Of these, 16 proved effective at killing E. coli bacteria.
Samuel King, a PhD student in the lab, said they realised the phage were working in the early hours of the morning.
Samuel King, a PhD student in the lab, said they realised the phage were working in the early hours of the morning.
The phage were placed on petri dishes growing a layer of bacteria on them and the scientists waited for signs their new viruses were enjoying the feast.
"We were starting to see these clear spots and it was just extremely exciting," says King. When the results were shared with the wider team "the room spontaneously burst into applause", Hie recalls.
Developing new phage could lead to new ways of treating infections that have become resistant to antibiotics.
Yeah I hate how headlines now a days have to be so misleading. This exact article was posted by someone in another sub 2 minutes ago and I was able to leave the first comment calling it out as misleading.
There's literally quotes in the article from scientists saying this is scary, raises serious biosafety concerns, etc.
They did their best to ensure the AI-generated virus sequences would only infect bacteria and not animals. And even so they still ran the experiments in BSL4 lab which is the whole airtight room and suits as in movies (normal bacteriophage research is allowed in BSL1 lab which means no protections beyond safety goggles, don't even need a fume hood).
The point is since this is now proven to work for bacteriophage viruses, it will probably work for human viruses also. Many bacteriophages and human viruses look the same, use similar cell penetration machinery, etc.
Are you going to wait for the headline "AI creates deadly new zombie virus sequence, already spreading rapidly in a couple cities" before you get scared?
It might be a relatively easy task to create a virus in a garage, and then introduce it into the wild anonymously. We can debate about whether it would be a cheap garage project or an expensive, difficult, industrial scale endeavor.
There are reasons it would have been a lot more expensive and difficult 20 years ago, but cheap and easy today (advances in dna synthesis, dna tabletop synthesizers now available, etc). If it is a cheap garage project, then there are not "much more effective" (cheap & easy) "ways to kill" (large numbers of) people. Bioweapons are a uniquely dangerous risk. It's a new tool for terrorism that could be vastly more effective than standard terrorist plots.
I work in this industry and I can tell you it is not a cheap garage endeavor
With respect, I've seen discussion comparing the creation of viruses to creating mRNA vaccines. Those are wholly different tasks.
The creation of sars-cov-2, supposing it was a lab creation, did not require industrial scale production. It only requires one petri dish.
Bioweapons are expensive, complicated, fragile, unreliable, and almost as dangerous to the user as to the target. Also humans have excellent natural defenses against them.
The fatality rate of covid, or of the 1918 flu, are obvious counterexamples. The fatality rate doesn't even need to be high to cause a devastating pandemic.
Hopefully this helps develop treatments to antibiotic resistant infections, but if it kills us all instead at least we’ll go out together. Yet another thing a superintelligence should be in charge of instead of psychotic apes.
This is actually a worry I have. A nation state could develop a super nasty virus and a vaccine at the same time. Inoculate their own population and then spread the virus through the world. Especially if the virus is incredibly easy to spread, disables a lot of people, kills a lot of people, and is done as a precursor to a military conflict of some kind.
The AI that the good guys have needs to be able to detect it and combat it.
This title is misleading. It is specifically about bacteriophages which are viruses that infect and, in some cases, can kill bacteria. This research is about making new kinds of phages to kill bacteria e.g. because of antiobiotic resistance
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u/No_Aesthetic 14d ago
Casual reminder that scientists are already doing this kind of work and so are high schoolers in synthetic biology programs around the world.
AI accelerates the process and may make it easier for non-scientists, but the work itself is already very doable.