When AI Meets Biology: Promise, Risk, and Responsibility
Advances in AI are opening extraordinary frontiers in biology. AI-assisted protein engineering holds the promise of new medicines, materials, and breakthroughs in scientific understandings. Yet these same technologies also introduce biosecurity risks and may lower barriers to designing harmful toxins or pathogens. This “dual-use” potential, where the same knowledge can be harnessed for good or misuse to cause harm, poses a critical dilemma for modern science.
Great Promise—and Potential Threat
I’m excited about the potential for AI-assisted protein design to drive breakthroughs in biology and medicine. At the same time, I’ve also studied how these tools could be misused. In