Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
Is this the scientist of the future? AI is driving a transformation across all fields of science.
Researchers have used AI to translate brain scans into text.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
Promising to change how it’s done and turbo charge research.
Emily Shuckburgh
Director, Cambridge Zero
We are the start of a really important journey.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
It could help to tackle some of the world’s most complex problems
It’s hoped that artificial intelligence will lead to break through drug discoveries.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
Despite challenges and anxieties.
You are really delving into the unknown.
Alex Zhavoronkov
CEO, Insilico Medicine
Remember those early days when people were criticising.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
Could AI prompt a new golden age of scientific discovery?
NOW&NEXT
Is AI revolutionising science?
Rhyl, Wales
Andy Davies
This is bear, the hair is my Siberian husky, 10 years old now but I can’t walk him anymore, he’s too strong. Come here Bear.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
In 2022 Andy Davies, a former soldier in the British Army was referred to hospital after suffering a persistent cough for several years. His doctor diagnosed him with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, or IPF. A lung condition in which the lungs become scarred and breathing becomes increasingly difficult.
Andy Davies
Thank you. I should have like seven and a half litre capacity lungs. I am down to about 4.6 litres so I look fine but I’m not fine, my lungs are getting smaller, the scarring is progressing and they will in time slowly suffocate me. There’s nothing they can do for me bar the hope of a double lung transplant.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
Ever since Andy has been trying to raise awareness about IPF and what it’s like to live with the condition.
Andy Davies
This is going to be my, my bedroom. We are going to have a shower in here and hopefully I’m not going to need it just yet but getting up and down the stairs is getting more and more difficult.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
With no cure available the outlook for people with IPF often feels bleak. Half of patients die within 5 years of diagnosis.
Andy Davis
My mental health hit absolute rock bottom. Then I started planning my funeral, I started picking my funeral songs and started doing all the things that I didn’t want other people to worry about doing. I could have an exacerbation tomorrow, the scarring could progress and I could end up on full time oxygen, sat in the chair and that is the long and short of it and that happens, happens all the time to people with this, this awful disease.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
Fortunately all may not be lost for those suffering from IPF. Today there’s hope from a technology that’s disrupting the world, Generative AI. These algorithmns are now being used to develop new drugs for diseases that are right now incurable. Alex Zhavoronkov runs a start-up called Insilico Medicine which in 2020 used AI to find a new treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
Alex Zhavoronkov
CEO, Insilico Medicine
We utilise generative AI to identify targets for proteins that are implicated in age related diseases and fibrotic diseases.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
Insilico has created several AI pharmaceutical platforms. One identifies the proteins in the body that might be targeted to influence the course of a disease. Another can design potential new drug molecules.
Alex Zhavoronkov
CEO, Insilico Medicine
Instead of searching for a needle in a haystack, we can generate perfect needles with the desired properties.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
And Insilico’s IPF drug is now in phase 2 clinical trials which means it’s currently being tested on patients with the condition.
It took just 18 months and only cost 3 million dollars to develop. That’s a fraction of the time and money normally spent. Using AI in the pre-clinical stage of drug development could bring a time and costs saving of 25-50%.
AI is also turbo charging aspects of biological research that have traditionally taken human scientists years.
A type of AI known as deep learning is powering Google DeepMind Alphafold. This is an algorithm that can predict the shape of a protein from its amino acid sequence. It’s not perfect, sometimes the shapes it predicts are wrong but Alphafold has built up a database of more than 200 million proteins and has been used by more than 2 million researchers according to Google DeepMind.
The efficiencies of cost and time on offer through AI have attracted big pharma particularly in China where investment in AI drug discovery topped 1.26 billion dollars in 2021.
Alex Zhavoronkov
CEO, Insilico Medicine
Drug discovery is forefront to many more players that are willing to bet a significant amount of capital so this democratisation, I think will lead to many more new therapeutics.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
AI has been part of the scientific toolkit since the 1960’s.
Now here’s a man playing drums and his opponent a multi-million dollar computer.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
For many decades it was limited to fields like mathematics or particle physics. But in recent years the use of AI across all fields of science has exploded.
Regina Barzilay
AI Faculty Lead, MIT Jameel Clinic
Lots of graduates in engineering, in sciences are familiar with AI techniques and it is easier and easier to use them.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
This change has empowered different kinds of AI to accelerate research in numerous fields of science. At the University of Cambridge Emily Shuckburgh is a Professor of mathematics who specialises in using AI to improve climate science.
Emily Shuckburgh
Director, Cambridge Zero
The advances in our scientific understanding are currently not just incremental which often they are, but really leaps and bounds because of AI because it is enabling us to look at the problem in a different way.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
Super resolution AI models can enhance low-res electron microscope images transforming images from this to this. While a method called literature based discovery uses AI to search through millions of research papers to find patterns and connections and then suggests new hypothesis for scientists to investigate. It can even match make collaborators from different fields.
And as well as new drug molicules AI algorithmns are helping to search for new materials for batteries and solar panels. Improve weather prediction and transform our understanding of the mysteries of animal communication.
Tel Aviv, Israel
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
Here at the University of Tel Aviv, Adi Rachum and her colleagues are using AI in their very own bat lab.
Adi Rachum
Researcher, Yovel Lab, Tel Aviv University
Welcome to my colony.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
These Egyptian fruit bats are recorded 24/7 to try and understand how they communicate with each other.
Adi Rachum
Researcher, Yovel Lab, Tel Aviv University
As you can see the colony was designed to mimic a cave as much as possible so the noises that they were making is because they were re-arranging. This is part of what we are trying to learn using the communication, using the vocalisation.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
The team uses an AI algorithm to link the calls with different behaviour patterns.
Adi Rachum
Researcher, Yovel Lab, Tel Aviv University
So I am watching a movie and I want to see what the bats are doing when they emit specific sounds.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
AI helps the scientist to understand much more about what these individual sounds might mean.
Adi Rachum
Researcher, Yovel Lab, Tel Aviv University
In this case I consider they are fighting but the fighting is over food, it’s not just a random fight. In the next movie, we can see that the communication is regarding mating.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
They found that some aspects of bat communication are closer to human speech than previously thought. The bats have their own dialects and the mother bats even use baby talk when communicating with their young.
Other scientists studying animal communication have used AI to spot regional accents among wolves and taken the first step towards decoding the sounds made by sperm whales.
However, some are sceptical about whether researchers in these fields will ever be able to record a representative range of sounds without introducing human bias into the data set. It’s a potential pitfall Adi is conscious of.
Adi Rachum
Researcher, Yovel Lab, Tel Aviv University
It is always going to be human interpretation when we are talking about behaviour with animals but that’s why we have a lot of recordings to try to be as accurate as possible.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
With all its promise to do good for science, AI could also end up accelerating the bad. Fraudulent research has been under the microscope recently.
Analysis suggest that AI fakery in scientific journals is on the rise. Some researchers have even been caught out after accidentally copying and pasting the phrase ‘regenerate response’ into their papers.
That’s the chatGTP button you press to make it re-write it’s latest answer.
Other data detectives have spotted the telltale appearance of AI generated gobbledygook in journals.
It’s the same tune and yet it’s different.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
Big data is replaced by colossal information. Random value is swapped for irregular esteem and artificial intelligence becomes counterfeit consciousness. Experts have identified more than a thousand papers that seem to have identical AI produced images even though they were submitted by different labs.
Emily Shuckburgh
Director, Cambridge Zero
The absolute central pillar of the scientific world is publishing and in a sense it is how the body of scientific understanding is built upon over time. There is obviously a role that it plays in the way in which you are judged as an individual scientist and consequently it’s also an area where there’s always concern as to whether or not there’s an opportunity for fraud to enter into that.
Liverpool, England
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
But like so many of the drawbacks we hear about AI, these are problems with us humans, not the machines. Many scientists are optimistic and believe in the promise of a golden era of scientific discovery.
One where AI not only turbo charges research but also transforms the scientific process itself.
This robot at the University of Liverpool in Britain may look a tad unassuming but it could be a glimpse into that future. In 2020 Andy Cooper decided to introduce some machine learning muscle into his chemistry lab.
Andy Cooper
Director, Materials Innovation Factory, University of Liverpool
We became aware of this rise of the use of mobile robots in other sectors such as automated manufacture warehouses and so on so we decided well rather than automate the instruments we will automate the chemist.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
What he landed on was a roving robot, one that would navigate the lab by touch sensors and light detection and ranging, LIDAR. Guided by AI this robot scientist uses the test results of one experiment to decide what to do next.
Andy Cooper
Director, Materials Innovation Factory, University of Liverpool
The robot did something like 700 experiments in this 8 day campaign and to reference that to a human chemist I’ve had PhD students previously working in the area of photo-catalysis and they wouldn’t have done that many photocatalytic experiments in a whole 4 year PhD.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
Last year Andy’s team focussed on giving the robot scientist more sophisticated AI to test for new materials for clean energy production.
Or as the team called it, putting a brain into the robot.
Andy Cooper
Director, Materials Innovation Factory, University of Liverpool
We are now beginning to look at the use of large language models, chat GPT and other models to encode the space or to describe the space, that’s the first challenge. The second challenge is to build in any kind of reasoning.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
And now there’s a double act.
Andy Cooper
Director, Materials Innovation Factory, University of Liverpool
We have two mobile robots here. This one is configured to do organic chemistry relevant to pharmaceuticals and the second one is configured to do catalysis research in the area of clean energy. You can imagine the scenario when a large pharmaceutical lab where you have 50 fume cupboards, 20 different instruments. We wanted to show that you could have a team of mobile robots that might be deployed in a much larger lab.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
Unlike their human counterparts, robots can work 24/7, well at least until they need to recharge their batteries.
As a result robot scientists or self-driving labs like these could ultimately make science more productive and they can also help with what’s known as the reproducibility crisis. There isn’t much kudos in repeating work that’s already been done or publishing failures so human scientists tend to dodge doing this. AI not only doesn’t suffer those hang-ups but also promises an ability to think outside the box.
Andy Cooper
Director, Materials Innovation Factory, University of Liverpool
I think ultimately the core idea is to find chemistry that helps humanity. I think the sort of breakthrough moment which I would say hasn’t quite happened yet is when one of these systems finds something and people say that simply couldn’t realistically have been conceived by humans alone.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
Lots of technologies through history have been hailed as the answer to the problems of human kind a usually nothing lives up to such a billing.
In the 1850’s the electric telegraph was expected to usher in world peace by bringing countries closer together, while pundits in the 1990’s said the internet would reduce inequality by making a first class education available online. But there are stronger grounds to believe that AI could indeed deliver something huge for scientific research.
A new golden age of discovery perhaps. Something like the one kick started by the scientific journal or the introduction of the laboratory. However for AI to truly realise its full potential, scientists have to be willing and able to use it on a much broader scale.
Regina Barzilay
AI Faculty Lead, MIT Jameel Clinic
You need to have the fine detailing, to have the right regulation, you need to monetise it correctly. AI technologies move so very fast but all this other aspects which require human intervention and human decision making is something that needs to be really prioritised.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
Overcome these human obstacles and AI could change science and the world for the better.
Regina Barzilay
AI Faculty Lead, MIT Jameel Clinic
We are entering the beautiful space where AI and sciences can really create something novel and new.
Alok Jha
Science and Technology Editor, The Economist
Hello, I’m Alok Jha, Science and Technology Editor at The Economist. If you’d like to read more about AI’s impact on science then click on the link opposite and if you’d like to watch more of our NOW&NEXT series, click on the other link. Thanks for watching and please don’t forget to subscribe.