Eric Topol

If you can predict, if you can query, if you can generate like that, it's reminiscent of the famous Go game of Lee Soto, the world champion player.

and how the machine came up with a move many, many years ago that no human would have anticipated.

I think that's what you're getting at and the ability for inference and reason now to add to this.

Charlotte, one of the things, of course, is about, well, there's two terms in here that are unfamiliar to many of the listeners or viewers of this podcast.

Universal representations and virtual instruments that you make a pretty significant part of how you are going about this virtual cell model.

So could you describe that and also the embeddings as part of the UR, the universal representation?

Because I think embeddings or these meaningful relationships are key to what Steve was just talking about.

Yeah, that's what I really liked, is that you basically described the architecture of how you're going to do this by putting these URs into the VIs, having a decoder and a manipulator, and you basically got the idea.

If you can bring all these different integrations about, which, of course, is pending.

Now, there are obviously many naysayers here that this is impossible.

One of them is this guy, Philip Ball.

I don't know if you read the language, How Life Works.

Now, he's a science journalist, and he's a prolific writer.

He says, comparing life to a machine, a robot, a computer, sells it short.

Life is a cascade of processes, each with a distinct integrity and autonomy, the logic of which has no parallel outside the living world.

Is he right?

There's no way to bottle this.

It's silly.

It's too complex.

Well, I mean, to capture people's imagination here, if you're successful and you marshal a global effort, I don't know who's going to pay for it because it's a lot of work coming here going forward.