Silvana Konermann

So this is a technology that allows us to look at one cell at a time and take a snapshot of key dynamic processes in the cell, which is the RNA expression of the cell.

So RNA is like the language of the cell, and this takes a snapshot, one cell at a time, of what's going on inside it.

And then the second step, which is changing, we need to have the ability to change something very precise.

So changing one gene at a time, stopping it from making the RNA or changing it to upregulate the RNA.

This is the area that I've been working on now for 15 years, CRISPR technology.

And as a field, we've made a

a lot of advancements, and now we can do this across all the genes in the genome, we can make these changes in a targeted way, and it's really only possible also very recently.

And then finally, I mean, of course, AI is at the forefront of everything, especially today, but we've just seen over, I would say, really the last two years that it's getting real, it's really working, and AI can help us understand these kinds of processes.

Yeah, exactly.

That's basically the core principle.

And for that, you need to be able to measure it and change it in this targeted way.

But as an analogy, the field was doubting this at the time.

I mean, even six years ago, it wasn't clear that

people were not sure that you could really scale these large language models just based on language and kind of predicting language to actually build kind of a conception of the world, essentially, and at least approximate intelligence clearly pretty well, right?

So this is the key insight for the last six years, which is that a model can learn so much just from human language.

And similarly, we can apply that concept to RNA, which is basically the language of the cell, especially the dynamic language of the cell, because it's changing all the time.

It reflects what's happening to the cell, but also it reflects the cell's genetics.

It's hard to say, but I will say one key difference for me, and I think this is why AI can be so powerful for biology, is that human language was generated by humans, right?

So we understand it, right?

We came up with it.