AI Cracks A Long Term Scientific Mystery
A scientific mystery, which had taken microbiologists a decade to get to the bottom of, has been solved in just 48 hours by a new Google Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool. Furthermore, the scientists using this AI tool have discovered a new antibiotic that can kill a deadly superbug.
Google's AI system has showcased its transformative potential in the realm of scientific research by making a significant breakthrough in anti-microbial resistance study.
By decoding a complex puzzle of how bacteria acquire antibiotic resistance through viral tail mechanisms, this AI got solutions that human researchers at Imperial College London had taken ten years to experimentally validate.
Professor José Penadés and his team at Imperial College London had spent years working out and proving why some superbugs are immune to antibiotics and are expected to kill millions of people a year by 2050. Penadés gave his co-scientist a tool made by Google and gave it the core problem he had been investigating and it reached a conclusion in 48 hours.
The decade spent by the scientists also includes the time it took to prove the research, which itself took several years.
Prof Penadés' said the tool had in fact done more than successfully replicate his research. The researchers have been trying trying to find out how some superbugs, dangerous germs that are resistant to antibiotics, get created. Their hypothesis is that the superbugs can form a tail from different viruses which allows them to spread between species. Prof Penadés likened it to the superbugs having "keys" which enabled them to move from home to home, or host species to host species.
Critically, this hypothesis was unique to the research team and had not been published anywhere else. Nobody in the team had shared their findings. Just two days later, the AI returned a few hypotheses, and its first thought, the top answer provided, suggested superbugs may behave in exactly the way his research described.
The AI currently functions as a 'co-scientist', generating hypotheses with remarkable accuracy and speed but relies on human researchers for the conduction of physical experiments and validation of results.
This symbiotic relationship between AI and scientists underscores the necessity of human insight and experimentation in the validation process and highlights AI's role as a powerful tool for hypothesis generation and preliminary analysis.
Nature | BBC | Telegraph | Yahoo | Open Tools | Guardian
Image: Ideogram
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