![\"Co-founder](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/a0862312-7267-42b2-8fa0-cbe177a631af.jpg\")
Gingko Bioworks\u2019 co-founder Jason Kelly poses for a portrait inside in Boston on June 8, 2021Jessica Rinaldi\/The Boston Globe via Getty Images<\/p>\nLast summer, in a secure laboratory in Boston, Massachusetts, a phalanx of robot arms silently measured and pipetted their way into the annals of science.<\/p>\n
Using a specialised process called cell-free protein synthesis they were able to produce proteins for 40 per cent less than a state-of-the-art facility. This was remarkable, not only because it was done in a human-free \u201ccloud lab\u201d, but that the effort was led by an AI: ChatGPT.<\/p>\n
Once given its objective \u2014 maximise output of grams of protein per dollar spent \u2014 OpenAI\u2019s chatbot acted as a far-off orchestra conductor. It took control of the lab\u2019s liquid handlers and centrifuges, incubators and plate readers. It formed hypotheses, designed experiments, then set the machines in motion, again and again. Over six months and more than 150,000 tests of compositions and techniques, it nailed down a process that yielded 27 per cent more protein than the best human teams have managed, and for nearly half the cost.<\/p>\n
Gingko Bioworks\u2019 co-founder Jason Kelly poses for a portrait inside in Boston on June 8, 2021Jessica Rinaldi\/The Boston Globe via Getty Images<\/p>\n
Jason Kelly, chief executive of Ginkgo Bioworks, whose cloud lab was used for the experiment, said it provided a glimpse of the future: mass automation followed, eventually, by full, self-driving science. <\/p>\n
\u201cAs a scientist, at least for a certain class of problem like these optimisation problems, you can spin up an agent and tell it, \u2018Go work for a few weeks. Do an experiment. Get the results. Design another experiment, get the results, and come back when you work down that tree.\u2019 You could maybe have 10, or 100, or 1,000 of those running at the same time, pursuing lots of different hypotheses. That\u2019s wild. That\u2019s a change to science.\u201d<\/p>\n
Executives and researchers have talked for years about how science will be the domain where AI delivers lasting, undeniable benefit<\/a>. Cancers cured. Lifespan doubled. Alzheimer\u2019s banished. Curing all disease was \u201cwithin reach\u201d, said Sir Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind, the artificial intelligence\u00a0research laboratory owned by Alphabet. Dario Amodei of AI business Anthropic predicted that AI will compress a century of scientific progress into the next decade.<\/p>\n Fuelling those visions are the convergence of automated labs and hyper-intelligent AIs<\/a> to drive them. Through another lens, however, critics warn that this marks the arrival of a terrifying new era, \u201cessentially making everyone a PhD virologist who can be walked through the process of designing, synthesising and releasing a biological weapon, step-by-step,\u201d Amodei warned. <\/p>\n OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman shares the concerns. Terrorists using AI to invent biological weapons, he said, is \u201cno longer a theoretical thing\u201d.<\/p>\n Early days<\/p>\n At the heart of the fear is AI\u2019s ability to empower people en masse. Just as hopelessly non-technical people can use these tools to build a website or an app, the expectation is that anyone will soon be able to deploy their favourite bot as a for-hire scientist, and then run experiments in a cloud lab. Gingko charges $39 per experiment.<\/p>\n These are early days. There are, depending on how you categorise them, just a handful of cloud labs today: for-hire facilities, accessible via the internet, where\u2014 for a fee \u2014 any researcher can run an experiment. Yet experts say the industry is on the cusp of a boom, similar to the 2010s cloud computing explosion, when companies got rid of their expensive in-house servers and instead rented space in the data centres of cloud giants such as Amazon Web Services. <\/p>\n Kelly estimated that cloud labs can run for one-tenth of the price of traditional facilities because they need less space to accommodate humans, and can run 24 hours a day.<\/p>\n The rise of the robot lab could dramatically accelerate the automation of drug discovery and production, a move that is already under way. Under pressure to cut costs, pharmaceutical giants and biotech start-ups are pushing the grunt work of science \u2014 designing and running trials, and data collection \u2014 to third-party contract research organisations (CROs)<\/a>. Others rely on contract development and manufacturing organisations (CDMO)<\/a> to manufacture their drugs. <\/p>\n China, meanwhile, has leveraged its low labour costs to transform itself into the new drug discovery engine for the West. In four years, the value of Chinese biotech assets licensed to Big Pharma has risen nearly tenfold \u2014 from about $14 billion to more than $135 billion.<\/p>\n The result is that the business of biology is becoming increasingly virtual, sitting atop a scattered supply chain \u2014 and regulation has not kept up. Bad actors could, for example, split an order for different pieces of, say, the Spanish flu, have them delivered and then bring them together in their own lab. <\/p>\n Scarier still, said Evan Davison Kotler, health security director at global advocacy group Helena, was AI\u2019s ability to bypass screening methods, which typically check lab requests against an index of sequences of known dangerous pathogens.<\/p>\n \u201cNew AI models are allowing us to produce protein sequences for viruses that look nothing like the original sequence, but they still function like them. So you could actually be holding Spanish flu. You could be holding ricin, and the nucleic acid sequence or the amino acid sequence looks nothing like that list you have to cross-reference. <\/p>\n \u201cIt is actually obfuscating the fact that this is indeed the thing that is hazardous. We don\u2019t have good answers for how you deal with that risk.\u201d<\/p>\n Kelly, for one, thinks the danger remains mostly theoretical. \u201cI don\u2019t see a lot of extra threat from AI personally,\u201d he said, arguing that despite the power of these new tools it is still \u201cnot trivial\u201d to actually produce a viable pathogen. For its part, Ginkgo has put in place extensive know-your-customer and quality controls to ensure its labs are not used for nefarious ends. <\/p>\n Whether a virus or bacteria is lab-made or naturally occurring, the West remains remarkably vulnerable, as Covid-19 showed. \u201cWe have a weird gap in defending ourselves against viruses because really, there\u2019s no economic engine,\u201d Kelly said. \u201cThe viable defence in the long run is to build mature antiviral and antibacterial defences. We need to do that anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n In the meantime, the technology is hurtling toward an era where, in the not too distant future, even a child, with the aid of an AI, can come up with an experiment and then check in at a Cloud Lab app and carry it out. Kelly said: \u201cA citizen science app would be pretty amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last summer, in a secure laboratory in Boston, Massachusetts, a phalanx of robot arms silently measured and pipetted…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":563214,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-563213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563213\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/563214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Headshot](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1be41417-48e2-4cdd-b361-b501eae280f4.jpg\")
Evan Davison Kotler Helena<\/p>\n