David Baker

Our conclusion was, first of all, that the current generation of design methods did not pose a threat compared to the huge threats that already are present in nature.

But second, that the way to control things and to make sure, was through the synthetic gene manufacturing step, where you go from the computer to the real world.

And as I said earlier, that's a key step in this process.

And that's the one where having like gating and control, or at least logging

we concluded would be really, really important.

And so we are urging DNA synthesis companies to keep track of everything that they're making so that in the event that there is a suspicious outbreak somewhere in the world, you can quickly track where the DNA came from if it was synthetic rather than being of natural origin.

And that's very clear so far.

I mean, the I mean, there's huge numbers of beneficial things have been done.

I mean, even in the area of pathogenic disease, you know, I described the vaccines, the antivirals.

And so the.

Yeah, I think the upsides far outweigh the downside.

The other thing we're doing is we are setting up a committee that's reviewing new software as it's created to make sure that there aren't unforeseen consequences.

I would say overall, the risks, if you think about AI and biology compared to AI generally, I think the immediate risk from AI more generally in the form of computer viruses, things that you don't have to instantiate in the real world, but that work in software, we're already seeing problems there.

And then, of course, we're seeing more broader problems

to be placing people.

I think those are probably the places where AI is gonna be really a problem, a negative rather than AI in the biological realm.

No, I think that already with problems like antibody generation, antibodies are really kind of the pharmaceutical industry.

Antibodies have been a mainstay and generally the way that antibodies are developed now, it's either from

sort of pulling antibodies out of an individual or immunizing an animal or screening through very, very large collection of very large random libraries for an antibody that has the right property.

I think those will be displaced by design because you can be much more intentional and design an antibody that not only binds to the right place on your target to have the effect you want, but also has all the properties needed to really be developed as a drug.