U.S. Scientists Assembled Viruses That Were Designed by AI — They Were Shocked When They Started Hunting Down Bacteria and Reproducing

(End of the American Dream)—Now we are allowing AI to create new viruses?  Are we mad?  What scientists at Stanford University are doing sounds like the plot to a really bad disaster movie.  Viruses that are designed by AI are assembled by crazy researchers, and then those viruses start hunting down bacteria and reproducing.  Needless to say, it doesn’t take much imagination to see where the rest of the movie would go.  I realize that all of this sounds completely insane, but this is actually happening in real life.  Our scientists really are assembling viruses that have been dreamed up by AI, and those viruses really are “capable of hunting down and killing strains of Escherichia coli”…

Scientists have created the first ever viruses designed by artificial intelligence (AI), and they’re capable of hunting down and killing strains of Escherichia coli (E. coli).

“This is the first time AI systems are able to write coherent genome-scale sequences,” says Brian Hie, a computational biologist at Stanford University, California. “The next step is AI-generated life,” says Hie, although his colleague Samuel King adds that “a lot of experimental advances need to occur in order to design an entire living organism”.

We are bringing viruses into existence that have never existed before.

Since AI can dream them up, allowing them to exist must be a good idea, right?

The AI entity that created these new viruses is known as “Evo”, and it was trained on the genomes of approximately 2 million different viruses…

In the new work, researchers at the Arc Institute sought to develop variants of a bacteriophage—a virus that infects bacteria—called phiX174, which has only 11 genes and about 5,000 DNA letters.

To do so, they used two versions of an AI called Evo, which works on the same principles as large language models like ChatGPT. Instead of feeding them textbooks and blog posts to learn from, the scientists trained the models on the genomes of about 2 million other bacteriophage viruses.

Ultimately, “Evo” designed 302 viruses.

The scientists conducting this twisted research decided that the best approach would be to chemically assemble all of them and see what happens.

Of the 302 viruses, 16 of them were capable of infecting real strains of E. coli and “cranking out copies of themselves”…

After probing the AI model, the team came up with 302 virus designs. The best way to test them, the researchers figured, was to print, or chemically assemble, all of them and unleash them on real strains of E. Coli.

As it turned out, some of them worked. Once inserted into the poor waiting germs, 16 of the AI-designed viruses successfully infected their hosts by inserting their DNA, hijacking the bacteria to start cranking out copies of themselves, and then burst through the cell’s body, killing it.

So what would happen if these viruses escaped from the lab and got loose?

Hopefully it would not cause a major crisis.

We are being told that these researchers specifically avoided viruses that could potentially infect people.

But they also admit that other researchers could potentially use AI to design viruses that would be extremely lethal to humans…

The Stanford researchers say they purposely haven’t taught their AI about viruses that can infect people. But this type of technology does create the risk that other scientists—out of curiosity, good intentions, or malice—could turn the methods on human pathogens, exploring new dimensions of lethality.

“One area where I urge extreme caution is any viral enhancement research, especially when it’s random so you don’t know what you are getting,” says Venter. “If someone did this with smallpox or anthrax, I would have grave concerns.”

It is just a matter of time before someone actually does this.

And once a highly contagious virus starts spreading all over the globe, it will be impossible to put it back in the bottle.

I don’t even want to think about how AI could modify the bird flu or the Marburg virus or the Ebola virus.

There is no way that we can stop those that are evil from using AI to create designer viruses that have the potential to kill hundreds of millions of people. Once they are released, the entire planet would be instantly paralyzed.

I keep warning that the next great pandemic is coming, and when it arrives it may not look like anything that the world has ever seen before.

In addition to monkeying around with viruses, mad scientists all over the world are using genetic engineering to create all sorts of really bizarre animals…

In April of this year, a company called Colossal Biosciences announced that it had brought back the dire wolf, which was extinct for more than 10,000 years. This was an incredible feat even if you’d been paying attention to recent developments in animal engineering. Today, humans who want to tinker with evolution have sophisticated and accelerated tools — not just cloning but also gene editing. Where cloning creates a genetic twin of an existing animal, gene editing via technology like CRISPR changes an animal’s DNA sequence, editing specific locations. CRISPR has led to new medical treatments for sickle-cell anemia and other diseases; it can also be used to create animals, often in conjunction with cloning. Gene-edited animals can be innovative, beautiful, and grotesque. Over the past couple of decades, scientists have used the technology to make cats, rabbits, monkeys, and mice glow in the dark for disease research; to create pigs specifically made to be farmed for their organs; to develop extra-muscly (and thus meaty) rabbits, sheep, pigs, and cattle; and to produce a drove of miniaturized pigs meant for drug-testing. (These ended up being so cute their creators sold them as pets.)

Our scientists are “playing God”, and nobody is stopping them. They insist that they have everything under control and that there will never be any serious consequences.

But of course there are always consequences. Just look at what happened when a nasty little bug escaped from a lab in Wuhan.

In the future, the “accidents” that we will witness will be far more dramatic. For years, many of us have been ranting and raving about how reckless our scientific community has become.

But nothing ever changes.

So they will just keep on doing what they have been doing behind closed doors, and ultimately millions will die as a result.

Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.