Eric Nguyen

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.