At first it was imperceptible. In the base of a petri dish, invisible to the naked eye, something never before seen in nature was stirring into life.
For the first time in history, scientists had used artificial intelligence to design the genetic code of a brand-new biological organism. In the lab at Stanford University, California, a new virus, codenamed Evo-Φ2147, was attacking a colony of E.coli bacteria in the petri dish.
Clear spots started appearing on the cloudy mass of bacteria, growing across the dish in expanding circles. It showed that slowly but surely, the new virus was killing the E.coli.
The breakthrough marks a turning point in the accelerating field of synthetic biology, allowing scientists to use AI to draw up the blueprints for entire genomes from scratch. It coincides with the development of a sophisticated new DNA construction technology that can turn those blueprints into reality — building long, complex genetic sequences with up to 100,000 times more accuracy than anything seen before.
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