How AI could generate new life-forms | Eric Nguyen
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 12.1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 August 2025
⏱️ 15 minutes
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Summary
If DNA is just a string of letters, could AI learn to read it … or even write it? Bioengineering researcher Eric Nguyen reveals how AI has upended the rules of biology, potentially creating a future where disease is cured with personalized medicine, extinct species are resurrected (Jurassic Park, anyone?) and microbes designed for Mars make interplanetary life possible. Learn more about how the world's first AI-designed CRISPR model successfully edited genes — and what it means for our understanding of life itself.
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| 1:05.2 | You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. |
| 1:06.3 | I'm your host, Elise Hugh. |
| 1:08.1 | When you think about AI literally generating new DNA, does that thrill you or |
| 1:14.1 | scare you? For bioengineer and genomic AI pioneer, Eric Nguyen, it's a little bit of both. But for him, |
| 1:21.8 | the possibilities of unlocking new medicines and curing diseases, among other things, makes it worth |
| 1:26.9 | the risk. |
| 1:34.0 | In his talk, he shares how looking at DNA as a language when the AI can learn to read, |
| 1:53.0 | write, and ultimately build will let us fundamentally change biology and life itself. I've always found it curious how biologists study life. There's this saying. |
| 1:56.0 | A biologist will learn how a car works by poking at it, removing one part at a time and seeing how it affects |
| 2:02.4 | the rest of the car. On the other hand, an engineer will learn how a car works by taking it |
| 2:09.0 | completely apart and rebuilding it. Take, for example, the Human Genome Project, one of |
| 2:16.6 | the biggest breakthroughs of the last century. |
| 2:19.3 | We spent over a decade mapping out all three billion letters of our genome, |
| 2:24.3 | the complete set of DNA. |
| 2:26.3 | We thought that once we could read DNA |
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