“The future of biology is programmable.”To give you a sense of how important this topic is, Patrick Hsu is the first guest we’ve had back to Ground Truths since the podcast began a few years ago. Nearly 2 years ago we spoke about digital biology but so much has happened since to help unravel the complexities in the language of life. Patrick is a co-founder and core investigator at the Arc Institute. His work is at the intersection of biology, engineering, and AI. At the ripe old age of 33, he’s a pioneer of genome editing technologies and my go-to for tracking progress in digital biology. Besides that he’s a great explainer with frequent use of metaphors and simplification of very complicated stuff.Here’s what we discussed with the relevant links:—Our recent review in Nature Biotechnology on the large language of life models (LLLMs). GBAI-generalist biological artificial intelligence —The 2 multi-agent AI Nature papers in May for accelerating drug discovery: Full House (Robin) and Google Deep Mind (Co-Scientist) Multiple drug candidates were described as an outgrowth of multi-agent AI , with a 200-fold decrease in workflow time.Below Figure from synthesis of the Robin and Co-Scientist papers: “AI devises hypotheses and ways to test them,” Nature News and Views, by Oliver Elemento—Biomni published in Science 9 JulyAn infographic by NotebookLM below helps give you a sense of what—a diversity of important tasks— accomplished by Biomni—New workbench offerings by the AI companies including Anthropic’s Claude Science, Open AI, Google DeepMind and the competition with academic spinoffs—Spud Cells —Virtual Cell project, which it’s such a big deal, and the importance of perturbations—Alzheimer’s disease with OpenAI for finding mechanistic new targets for drug discovery—The Nature Editorial —Mid-Journey’s Ultrasound Imaging of the “Whole-Body” (and we’re not imaginative enough, the need to think big)—Mitigating the worries about humans as lab assistants and nefarious use to produce bioweapons *******************************************************************************A big thanks to Ground Truths subscribers from every US state and 212 countries. Your subscription to these free essays and podcasts makes my work in putting them together worthwhile. If you’re not a subscriber, please join!If you found this interesting PLEASE share it!Paid subscriptions are voluntary and all proceeds from them go to support Scripps Research. They do allow for posting comments and questions, which I do my best to respond to. Please don’t hesitate to post comments and give me feedback. Let me know topics that you would like to see covered.Many thanks to those who have contributed—they have greatly helped fund our summer internship programs for the past two years. It enabled us to accept and support a record number of 61 summer interns here with us now! These are high school, college and medical students selected from thousands of applicants. We couldn’t do this expanded program without the funds coming in through Ground Truths.Finally, thank you Alan Heldman MD, Bob Fleischman, Jeanie, Maureen Susannah, Mary Powers, and more than 400 others for tuning into my live video with Patrick Hsu! Join me for my next live video in the app. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.