A Change Maker Playing God

Morning Change Makers, 

In this morning’s briefing, I have just one changemaker to write about. 

But this one is golden. Read on.

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I have spent the last week engulfing myself in religious enlightenment. 

Last Monday evening I went to Sung Mass at Westminster Cathedral where the pastor (or clergyman or priest, one of them) gave a sermon on the creation. The TLDR was god-created the world in 6 days and put his (or her, I don’t know) feet up on the 7th.

Unfortunately, I felt no heavenly presence at Mass but the story of creation got me thinking. Up until Darwin, it was believed that God created animals and humans on the 6th day. It then became clear that humans evolved over billions of years. Darwin brought about a biological enlightenment.

As my religious fervour weakened, I stumbled upon a tweet that announced that a company called, Profluent Bio, had used AI to create proteins, the likes of which humans had never seen.

Becoming god

Humans have the power to create things that not even gods had the ability to create. Let me explain.

The human genome is made of bases and there are 4 of them: A, C, T, and G. The order of the bases codes the structure of amino acids, which in turn define the structure of proteins. Proteins are the building blocks of all organic life. 

CRISPR is a technology that came to prominence in the 2000s and it allowed us to edit genes. It can find specific sections of your genes and change the order of the bases using a protein called CAS-9 (the C part of CRISPR). CAS-9 is found in bacteria and other alternatives are found in nature.

You can imagine CRISPR as a plumber that needs to remove and replace a section of a pipe. CAS-9 is like the plumber’s tools. 

If the plumber is using blunt and old tools, he will do a poor job. But if he uses new and up-to-date tools he will be able to replace the pipe with a new section easily. 

We can edit our genes to make healthier and better humans.

Who are Profluent Bio?

Profluent Bio was founded on the principle that AI is an “interpreter to decode the language of life and transcend the limits of traditional protein engineering.” What does that mean today?

Profluent has built the world's first Large Protein Model. You may have heard of large language models and this works the same but for proteins. 

This company trained an AI model on billions of protein and base sequences. Protein sequences are the order of the amino acids.

The theory is that if you could order amino acids more efficiently, you could make newer versions of the CAS-9 protein in CRISPR.

Better versions of CAS-9 can make gene edits with few errors. This is like the plumber having better tools to replace the pipe.

If you reached the end of this biology lesson, why am I writing about Profluent? 

Profluent released a paper two weeks ago that showed their model built a protein never before seen in nature. Profluent’s model learned from natural systems and encoded a protein structure that does not exist in the natural world. 

What does this mean for the future? 

It was not long ago that humans unanimously believed in the biblical creation of life. 

Profluent AI is arming us with tools we never had in our toolbox. We can, in theory, synthesize new proteins in the gene editing process that neither God nor Darwinian evolution had the power to create. 

Practically this means we accelerate the speed of genomic discoveries. Everything that is possible in the world of the genome is now more discoverable. There is no historical analogy; AI can now synthesise new information, something only humans were previously capable of. Whether that is new treatments for diseases, genetically enhanced plants, or bio-engineering new foods. 

Book of Genisis 1:26 “Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth,”. 

Profluent and other companies like it are giving humanity dominion over every biological stratum, in a way that no God ever did.

More reading

Profluent Bio Paper
NYT piece on Profluent Bio
All-In Podcast (59:47)