Generative A.I. technology is generating blueprints for microscopic biological mechanisms that can edit your DNA, pointing to a future when scientists can battle illness and diseases with even greater precision and speed than they can today. The technology is based on the same methods that drive ChatGPT, and learns to generate language by analyzing Wikipedia articles, books and chat logs. It creates new gene editors after analyzing enormous amounts of biological data, including microscopic mechanisms that scientists already use to edit human DNA.
These gene editors are based on Nobel Prize-winning methods involving biological mechanisms called CRISPR. Technology based on CRISPR is already changing how scientists’ study and fight illness and disease, providing a way of altering genes that cause hereditary conditions, such as sickle cell anemia and blindness. The system has learned from nature to create them, but they are new. The hope is that the technology will eventually produce gene editors that are more nimble and more powerful than those that have been honed over billions of years of evolution.
More information:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/22/technology/generative-ai-gene-editing-crispr.html