Levers for Biological Progress
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Some interesting excerpts:
“Biology is probably the area where scientific progress has the greatest potential to directly and unambiguously improve the quality of human life,” Amodei writes. “My basic prediction is that AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years.”
To understand what I mean by “biophysical” bottlenecks, just consider the ongoing quest to build a virtual cell. This is one of the biggest ambitions amongst biologists today, and more than a hundred scientists — at Arc Institute and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, for example — are working to build models that can accurately simulate living organisms. A virtual cell would enable researchers to perform biology research on computers, rather than actual organisms, thus removing challenges that arise from working in the “world of atoms.” But the creation of a virtual cell is not possible by computation alone; we’ll first need to understand much more about how cells work, using real-world experiments.
An apt comparison for this pursuit of a virtual cell is the hydrogen atom in physics, which has become something of a universal language for that field. The hydrogen atom enabled physicists to build a quantum theory of matter. And because lots of physicists were working with the same atom, they could easily compare results between experiments to construct foundational theories. Biology has no such common language. The cell is the most basic unit of life, and yet it evades our understanding. Even E. coli, the most widely-studied microbe of all time, has hundreds of genes with unknown functions, and we cannot predict how mutations in, say, genes A+B+C will affect the phenotype of the organism. By “solving the cell” then, I think biologists will find their hydrogen atom and, over time, construct a foundation of knowledge upon which successive generations can build. Again, this can be done by speeding up experiments and making better measurement tools.
The speed of experiments is likely the greatest bottleneck to biology research as a whole because this fundamentally limits the number of ideas we can test, as Sam Rodriques, CEO of FutureHouse, has written. But looking ahead to the second bottleneck, what does it mean to say that biology is “complex”?
One way to speed up experiments is literally to make biology go faster, or to remove the “slow stuff” from experiments entirely*.* DNA cloning and many other methods require, for example, that scientists first “grow up” DNA molecules by replicating them inside of living cells, such as E. coli. If we could get E. coli to grow twice as fast — or find ways to clone genes without using organisms at all — then we could shave off a day or two from experiment times. Just because E. coli “evolved” to divide every 20 minutes does not necessarily mean that these cells are biophysically unable to grow faster.
Cells are complex, in part, because they vary greatly over space and time. Atomic bonds are measured in Angstroms (10-10 meters), molecules in nanometers, cells in micrometers, and animals in meters — biological systems span more than ten orders of magnitude. Experiments performed at one scale don’t always produce data that are informative for experiments at other scales. Cells are also densely packed and the biophysical interactions within them are highly stochastic and probabilistic. (Biophysicists often write their equations using statistical mechanics, calculating probabilities to model the behaviors of large collections of molecules.)
Biology is awash in discovery and wonder, as Teitelman says, but actually bringing the fruits of that science into the world involves things beyond wonder. It involves pragmatism and cultural sensitivity. It demands protocols, regulations, and collaborative efforts between human beings. To that end, it isn't clear that technical hurdles themselves are the biggest challenge for biology this century; and that will hold true even with the emergence of a superintelligence.