Designing the Blueprint of Life
We have begun research on designing completely new blueprints of life using AI (artificial intelligence) by training it on the blueprints of life of all living organisms on Earth.
The blueprint of life is written in the DNA within the cell's nucleus. The human blueprint of life is a string of characters three billion long. As the technical term "DNA base sequence" suggests, the blueprint of life is written as a string of four types of nucleic acid molecules (A, C, G, T) arranged in a line. And there are tens of millions of species of organisms on Earth. Furthermore, even within the same species, the DNA strings differ slightly between individuals. Even among humans, each person's DNA string is different. There are seven billion people living on Earth. We have the AI relentlessly learn from this ultra-vast amount of DNA string data, which is [tens of millions of species] × [billions of individuals] × [billions of characters in a string]. Then, just as an AI trained on a massive number of images can identify images with an accuracy far surpassing human ability, an AI trained on DNA strings can learn to distinguish the differences between blueprints of life. For example, it can identify that this DNA belongs to Mr. A, a Japanese person, and that DNA belongs to a morning glory blooming in a Tokyo garden. Furthermore, just as an AI trained on a massive number of images can create synthetic images that are indistinguishable to humans, and an AI trained on a large volume of text can write novels, an AI trained on DNA strings will be able to create new blueprints of life. The newly designed DNA strings can be synthesized as actual DNA molecules using the latest chemical technology. If these are introduced into a cell's nucleus, it means that a new life could potentially be born. This academic field of creating such new life and artificial cells is called synthetic biology.
Many of you who have read this far may think this is an act of blasphemy or that it is ethically unacceptable. Of course, ethical discussions are essential, but here, I am speaking purely from a scientific perspective. In reality, the story described above is not that simple. The combinatorial space of DNA strings is vast, and most newly designed DNA ends up as completely useless junk. Even if a DNA string is created with considerable accuracy, it will not function as a blueprint if there is even a slight error. This is similar to how you would consider a novel with even slightly strange sentences to be a poor work. If an AI could create a completely new DNA string with some function from scratch, it would be like winning the lottery. Conducting this kind of research only fills me with awe at how exquisitely God has created our blueprint of life.
Sakakibara Lab URL http://www.dna.bio.keio.ac.jp/