Eric Topol

We're getting into foundation models in a second.

A good friend of mine and part of this whole, I think, process that you got together, Aaron Siegel from Israel, he said, we're at this tipping point.

All the stars are lying and we have all the different components, the data, the compute, the modeling.

And in the paper, you describe how we have over the last couple of decades have so many different data sets that are rich, that are global initiatives.

But then there's also questions, do we really have the data?

I think Bo Wang especially asked about that.

Maybe Charlotte, what are your thoughts about data deficiency?

There's a lot of data, but do you really have what we need before we

bring them all together for this kind of single model that will get us someday to the virtual cell.

Speaking of data, one of the things I think that's fascinating is we saw how AlphaFold2 really revolutionized predicting proteins.

But remember, that was based on this extraordinary resource that had been built, the protein data bank that enabled that.

And for the virtual cell, there's no such thing as a protein data bank.

It's so much more, as you emphasize, Charlotte, it's so much dynamic and these perturbations that are just, you know, all across the board, as you emphasize that.

Now, the human cell atlas, which is currently some tens of millions, but going into a billion cells, we learned that it used to be 200 cell types, now I guess it's well over 5,000, and that we have 37 trillion cells approximately in the average person, adult's body.

is a formidable map that's being made now.

And I guess the idea that you're advancing is that we used to, and this goes back to a statement you made earlier, Steve, everything we did in science was hypothesis driven.

But if we could get this computational model of the virtual cell, then we can have AI exploration of the whole field.

Is that really the nuts of this?

Well, yeah, I mean, the premise here is that there is a language of life.

And you just made a good case that there is.