Kara Santamaria

Wow.

We were your break.

That's saying something.

I was confused there for a second, too.

Deep in there about taxes being your passion.

But, yeah, you're right.

Yeah.

Yeah, so we've talked about this a few times in the past, but I feel like this is one of those topics that's often maybe ancillary to whatever the main story that we're covering is.

So I thought that I would dig a little bit deeper into an article that was published recently in The Conversation by Dr. Stephen D. Turner, who is an associate professor of data science at the University of Virginia.

As he says, I'm a data scientist who studies genomics and biosecurity, and I research how AI is reshaping biological research and what safeguards that demands.

And so I thought we would talk about the two sides of the coin here, because very often on the SGU, when we discuss technology, we are tasked with really digging deep into what all of the incredible benefits could be of this technology, but also how

Every time a new technology allows us to do some pretty incredible things, it also has a potential dark side, right?

Like what happens if this gets into the wrong hands?

What happens if this is used by nefarious actors?

So that's really what this article that he wrote is all about.

So he mentions how basically it all starts with a conversation about open AI, along with a biotech company called Ginkgo Bioworks, who just this year announced that GPT-5 had run on its own autonomously, not just run, but actually designed and run 36,000 biological experiments.

So how does a large language model run a biological experiment?

Because I think often we kind of gloss over the specifics.

And when you hear the word biological experiment, you think like wetware, right?

Like biology.