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This is actually really cool.
These researchers have used machine learning techniques to generate a model for a virus they theorised could kill E. coli, then synthesised that virus, and found it did actually kill E. Coli.
Phages, viruses that infect bacteria, can and have saved lives. It’s a new treatment that was pioneered in the last few years and if you get, for example, a bad enough staph infection, it’s one of the only things that can save you. The difficulty is, each phage typically only infects a very specific species of bacteria. This if not a problem at all for bacteria like golden staph which are typically the same (or similar enough for the phages that infect them) everywhere in the world, but there are also a lot of hyper localised bacteria.
I’ve been involved in a research project that involved collecting bacteria from local communities to try and search them for phages that could be used to treat bacterial infections in those communities, there’s a huge amount of medical research time and funding going towards discovering new phage, keeping useful ones in cold storage, and airlifting them out in medical emergencies.
If we can create and synthesise custom phages it will save thousands of lives every year.
Is it cool? Yes.
Is manufacturing novel viruses a scientific discovery that we’re ready to handle, such that it will help more people than harm them? I’m extremely convinced the answer is no. Thousands of lives will be a drop in the ocean compared to when someone makes COVID-19 2. Or when someone kills all the monoculture corn and wheat in the world.
I get where you’re coming from.
We’ve been able to make new viruses for decades.
Scientists were DNA editing together boutique polio strains way back in 2002.
This news article is about is a machine learning model which you feed bacterial DNA, and it (quite successfully!) generates a genome for a virus that can potentially kill that bacteria.
Pretty much every scientific advance has the potential to be used as a weapon. These scientists have taken very weaponisable technologies technologies (deep learning, virus synthesisation) and used them to create a new technique that can cure people suffering from late stage and antibiotic resistant bacterial infections. Could another research lab try and use a similar technique to develop bioweapons? Sure, maybe. That’s not what’s been done here, and this work hasn’t pushed the frontiers of those technologies in a particularly weaponisable direction. I’m very convinced that their work specifically is going to save far more lives than it takes.
Machine learning is incredibly important and not like generative ai and I hate how people conflate it. Basically all industry in China operates with machine learning vibration detection to resolve production line issues quickly. If you banned machine learning there would be almost no industry in the world that could operate at scale properly
Its the Ai people who conflate these things on purpose. Even China still uses the term AI for this stuff you can’t really expect people to just ignore that until that gets fixed.
This is one of the things I’ve always found awesome: Using viruses to kill viruses, using bacteria to kill bacteria; it’s awesome to think that maybe in fifty years we’ll treat gunshot victims by shooting them
(just so we’re clear I am joking; I do actually think science has come up with ingenious ways to treat people)
It’s a new treatment that was pioneered in the last few years
I’m sure there have been recent advances, but the Soviets used phage therapies all the way back in 1930
August 6 - “The newly developed virus poses no threat to people”
August 11 - “Tell my wife I loved her”
August 13 - ThEy WeRe EaTiNg PaNgOlInS!!!
All I can think of is all those grad students whose work got scraped and scrambled to be fed into these fucking Pete’n’repeat machines
Is it more a T-Virus or a G-Virus?
It’d have to be T first; the AI would have been trained on Progenitor. In-game, we’d likely see each of these referred to as “strains” of T, despite the possible wildly different effects and outcomes, since naming tended to be generational in the RE series. Or, one is T, one is G, and the others are dead ends; and development continues on those that show promise for B.O.W. or life-enhancement applications.
Technically, the T-series was the only one that was intentionally developed, I believe, and G was a natural evolution of the virus within a specific host.
So the Progenitor, then the T-, then the G-… then you feed that into an AI…
Gotta call it the GPT-Virus at that point.
Are RFK’s brainworms Plagas or Cadou?
I think evidence would point toward Cadou given that those were naturally occuring parasites exposed to The Mold.
Screwworm mutation feels like the most likely Plagas candidate in the current timeline
There’s also the The Last of Us take to consider, where we already have the background warnings that rampant global warming is forcing fungi to adapt to warmer temperatures, which may increase their tolerance of human body temperature.
Soon we’ll get a hellmouth opening in California.
Or Deimos
Source: trust me the AI got the genome 100% right it’s functional and super scary
Today: “pose no threat to people”
Tomorrow: pose no threat to “people”
