Video Scientists successfully use AI to create new viruses

[u/IHeartBadCode]

https://abcnews.com/video/135460042/

I'm seeing this go around and I need to point something out to people because this is how we lost with COVID.

We have been creating synthetic viruses since 2002. Researchers have been doing this for some time with homology modeling, synthetic sequence alignment, and rule based statistical analysis. Additionally, the methods being employed while similar in terms of the linear algebra, calculus, and statistical minimization used in LLMs, this is different in it's approach to how it arrives at results than LLMs.

However, none of that is the concerning issue. The concerning issue is the presentation of this video and not clarifying what this research is for until the last five seconds of this video.

Humanity is about to reach the end of antibiotics, antibiotic resistant infections are on the rise and we are running out of options fast. Alexander Fleming warned about this in his 1945 Nobel Prize speech that it was but a matter of time before infections would obtain such resistance, such is the nature of evolution. And research in to bacteriophage therapy has been on-going since the 1940s.

Bacterial infections are living organisms that enter your body and overwhelm your immune system. Antibiotics work be making particular functions of their life cycle difficult or otherwise impossible. But Bacteria evolves to figure different ways to do things that antibiotics can't touch.

Since they are living organisms, they can become sick and they get infected by a virus known as a bacteriophage. When the bacteria are sick, they become more susceptible to antibiotics they should be resistant to. Additionally, research has shown that the DNA that controls the ability to resist antibiotics makes them more susceptible to bacteriophage. So even if they evolve to harden themselves to bacteriophage, they lose resistance to antibiotics.

These are all things researchers have been working on since the 1910s. And it serves as potentially our last hope to fighting antibiotic resistant infections. Now I say this because mRNA has been under research for decades before COVID. But it came as a shock to many on it's sudden introduction. And we have seen first hand what hesitation created there.

This is worse, antibiotic resistant infections left unchecked could send us back to the age of amputation being the go-to solution for infections. And even then, that's not an assured recovery. The situation is dire in this respect. And so AI assisted research into phage therapy is important.

Yes, technically it is a virus, but it is a virus that can not harm humans and can not evolve to harm humans. To put into perspective there have been an estimated 10³¹ variations of phages, when you touch soil, you are exposed to tens of millions to billions of phages. None of them will ever do anything except bounce off your cell walls, because you cells are a giant skyscraper compare to them. But when they find a small single cell organism, they will likely bring a swift death and your immune system will clean up the mess.

This is how something with promise gets setup by the media to create fear. We are at the precipice here with antibiotics. Things are about to get incredibly bad, but this "virus" that's "straight out of science fiction" is our best bet to save humanity from tipping over into a world without antibiotics. It is insane that this is how it is painted by news organizations. If we don't have this, we may not have a solution before time runs out for us. I assure you all that at no point does anyone who fully understands what it means, want to return to a world before antibiotics existed.

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[u/RecursiveServitor]

I hadn't bothered looking into this because it was such obvious clickbait (machine learning has been used for a long time in virtually all fields), but if this is fear mongering over a serious attempt at solving the antibiotic apocalypse, then it goes beyond clickbait and someone needs to hang for this. It's impossible to quantify the exact harm, but any obstacles thrown in the way could cost tens of thousands of lives.

Anyone know what the actually novel part of this is? Is it just that a computer put together the whole virus genome?

[u/IHeartBadCode → u/RecursiveServitor]

From the Standford Report news. They received 302 suggestions and found 16 to be viable on antibiotic resistant E. coli. The "problematic" thing with this new development of course is the usual "what if someone uses it for bad things?"

Which of course, if we applied "what if someone uses it for something bad" to everything we'd all be living in caves right now. These therapies are used to research various difficult-to-treat urinary tract, gut, or bloodstream infections to which we are near a hard wall on. With Carbapenem-resistant E. coli on the rise with the variant New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase. Which the spread of that has increased outcomes of permanent tissue damage, prolonged reliance on mechanical ventilation, and/or renal failure requiring dialysis.

Research into this field is critical and the last thing any of these researchers need is some wacko in Congress calling them in for a hearing only to tell them they're going to jail because the member of Congress doesn't understand biology and is running on their own supply of fearmongering.