After Covid you would have thought this type of experimentation would be illegal.

From MIT:

AI-designed viruses are here and already killing bacteria

https://www.technologyreview.c...-bacteriophage-life/

A research team in California says it used AI to propose new genetic codes for viruses—and managed to get several of these viruses to replicate and kill bacteria.

The scientists, based at Stanford University and the nonprofit Arc Institute, both in Palo Alto, say the germs with AI-written DNA represent the “the first generative design of complete genomes.”

The work, described in a preprint paper, has the potential to create new treatments and accelerate research into artificially engineered cells. It is also an “impressive first step” toward AI-designed life forms, says Jef Boeke, a biologist at NYU Langone Health, who was provided an advance copy of the paper by MIT Technology Review.

In the new work, researchers at the Arc Institute sought to develop variants of a bacteriophage—a virus that infects bacteria—called phiX174, which has only 11 genes and about 5,000 DNA letters.

To do so, they used two versions of an AI called Evo, which works on the same principles as large language models like ChatGPT. Instead of feeding them textbooks and blog posts to learn from, the scientists trained the models on the genomes of about 2 million other bacteriophage viruses.

But would the genomes proposed by the AI make any sense? To find out, the California researchers chemically printed 302 of the genome designs as DNA strands and then mixed those with E. coli bacteria.

That led to a profound “AI is here” moment when, one night, the scientists saw plaques of dead bacteria in their petri dishes. They later took microscope pictures of the tiny viral particles, which look like fuzzy dots.

“That was pretty striking, just actually seeing, like, this AI-generated sphere,” says Brian Hie, who leads the lab at the Arc Institute where the work was carried out.

Overall, 16 of the 302 designs ended up working—that is, the computer-designed phage started to replicate, eventually bursting through the bacteria and killing them.

J. Craig Venter, who created some of the first organisms with lab-made DNA nearly two decades ago, says the AI methods look to him like “just a faster version of trial-and-error experiments.”

More at link

There are useful bacteria. Ones key to life. Maybe our own.

We're so smart we might actually kill our species by playing with things we don't understand.

I would think that creating new viruses out of nothing is "gain of function" research, which is illegal.

All fun and giggles until some idiot coder finger fucks the keyboard and types "obligate biped" instead of "obnoxious bacterium" for his persistent predation virus, and doesn't wash his hands before going to the bathroom...

or

A) bacteriophage are fascinating to work with - AI will not be better.

Might improve screening methods, but will not design better viruses.

B) They are, mostly, harmless. Turns out MRSA - at least some strains of it, is actually the result of a bacteriophage infecting staph already on the patient.

The “Fermi paradox” is the question posed by Enrico Fermi: “Where are they?” in reference to other intelligent life forms in the universe. His thought was that because any such beings would be much older than humans and therefore should have mastered interstellar travel long before now, they should have visited us by now. Even if we discount the possibility of practical interstellar travel, there should be other signs we could detect, but nothing.

I’m not the first to think of one answer, but I believe it’s extremely likely: Once a species becomes intelligent and technologically capable enough, it inevitably develops the means of destroying itself—and inevitably does. If ours is any example, the time between being able to do that and the great likelihood of its happening is far less than an eyeblink in cosmic time.

I do not personally have any opinion about this development and it seems as though it could offer great benefits, but that has been said about other developments from the idea that high explosives would make war too horrible to wage to, “Whatever happens, we have got, the Maxim gun, and they have not,” as self-confident assurance that “primitive people” could never be any threat to us.

Uncle Ted may have been right.

The ever famous “ This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it.” comes to mind

What could possibly go wrong?

Like Q said, just wait until a human types in something wrong. Last prescription I picked up at a Walgreens mentioned erectile dysfunction. I thought, “What the hell?” I asked them about it and it was supposed to be ED as in “End Date” but someone coded it as erectile dysfunction.

…”They’re the ones who are going to do it. I can't do anything more now, I have to go, have a Merry Christmas.”…

There's a certain kind of hubris amongst some science or engineering types. The idea that they are smart enough to control everything, so that the really bad outcome cannot possibly happen.

Someone, somewhere, is going to attempt every horrible idea. Sometimes we have to do it so that they don't get the military advantage. e.g. atomic bombs, or weapons in orbit. Sometimes they should be prevented using every necessary force.

Creating viruses should be forcibly prevented. We were lucky that the C19 virus didn't wipe us out. We were equally lucky (so far) that the mRNA jabs didn't kill most everyone.

Humans are supremely stupid.

Playing God when you’re not God is a recipe for disaster.

Nothing good will come of this.

I remember telling my Doc when he asked, “What Covid vaccine did you get, Pfizer, J&J, Moderna?”
I told him none and that I had seen I Am Legend.

“Playing God when you’re not God is a recipe for disaster” should be drilled into every skull thinking of trying shit like this.
With a real drill if that’s what it takes.

Here’s a case where researchers tried to alter a virus to make mice infertile.

quote:

They hoped that the altered mousepox virus would induce infertility in mice

quote:

To their surprise, they discovered that the altered virus could kill both mice that were naturally resistant to, and mice that had been vaccinated against ordinary mousepox.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2816623/

quote:

To their surprise, they discovered that the altered virus could kill both mice that were naturally resistant to, and mice that had been vaccinated against ordinary mousepox.

Bret Weinstein likes to explain that biological systems are complex, which means that there are factors we cannot know or understand. And that means we cannot predict the outcome of messing with something.

That contrasts with complicated, such as a motor vehicle or a computer. Humans do understand how those work, even if there are so many factors that one human cannot know everything about it.

Too many scientists in numerous fields confuse complicated with complex.

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:
Nothing good will come of this.

...is said of nearly every scientific advancement. I'd argue that extremely good and extremely bad things COULD come from this. Hopefully, the good is longer lasting. Or we get to an extinction level event fairly quickly.