From The New York Times, April 22:
Much as ChatGPT generates poetry, a new A.I. system devises blueprints for microscopic mechanisms that can edit your DNA.
Generative A.I. technologies can write poetry and computer programs or create images of teddy bears and videos of cartoon characters that look like something from a Hollywood movie.
Now, new A.I. technology is generating blueprints for microscopic biological mechanisms that can edit your DNA, pointing to a future when scientists can battle illness and diseases with even greater precision and speed than they can today.
Described in a research paper published on Monday by a Berkeley, Calif., startup called Profluent, the technology is based on the same methods that drive ChatGPT, the online chatbot that launched the A.I. boom after its release in 2022. The company is expected to present the paper next month at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy.
Much as ChatGPT learns to generate language by analyzing Wikipedia articles, books and chat logs, Profluent’s technology creates new gene editors after analyzing enormous amounts of biological data, including microscopic mechanisms that scientists already use to edit human DNA.
These gene editors are based on Nobel Prize-winning methods involving biological mechanisms called CRISPR. Technology based on CRISPR is already changing how scientists study and fight illness and disease, providing a way of altering genes that cause hereditary conditions, such as sickle cell anemia and blindness.
Previously, CRISPR methods used mechanisms found in nature — biological material gleaned from bacteria that allows these microscopic organisms to fight off germs.
“They have never existed on Earth,” said James Fraser, a professor and chair of the department of bioengineering and therapeutic sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, who has read Profluent’s research paper. “The system has learned from nature to create them, but they are new.”
The hope is that the technology will eventually produce gene editors that are more nimble and more powerful than those that have been honed over billions of years of evolution....
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