Eric Topol

And Steve Quake, a young friend of mine for many years, who heads up the Chan Zuckerberg Institute as well as a professor at Stanford.

So welcome, Charlotte and Steve.

Yeah, so you wrote this article that Charlotte, the first author, and Steve, one of the senior authors, appeared in Cell in December, and it just grabbed me because how to build a virtual cell with artificial intelligence, priorities and opportunities.

It's the holy grail of biology.

We're in this year of digital biology.

As you point out in the paper, it's a convergence of what's happening in AI, which is just moving at a velocity that's just so extraordinary, and what's happening in biology.

Maybe we can start off by, you had some 42 authors that I assume they congregated for a conference or something, or how did you get 42 people to agree to the words in this paper?

And Gerald, how did you get to be drafting the paper?

Yeah, and it's actually amazing because it's a who's who of people who work in life science, AI, and digital biology, and omics.

I mean, it's pretty darn impressive.

So I thought I'd start off with a quote in the article because it kind of tells a story of where this could go.

So the quote was in the paper, AIVC, that's artificial intelligence virtual cell, has the potential to revolutionize the scientific process

leading to future breakthroughs in biomedical research, personalized medicine, drug discovery, cell engineering, and programmable biology.

That's a pretty big statement.

So maybe we can just kind of toss that around a bit and maybe give it a little more thoughts and color as to what you were positing there.

Yeah, and I think a lot of people may not understand why it is considered the Holy Grail, because it is the fundamental unit of life, and it's incredibly complex.

It's not just all the things happening in the cell, with atoms and molecules and organelles and everything inside, but then there's also the interactions of the cell to other cells on the outside.

tissue and world.

So, I mean, it's really quite extraordinary challenge that you've taken on here.

And I guess there's some debate, of course, as to do we have the right foundation?