Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize for gene editing and went on Bloomberg to say the chatbots everyone is betting on cannot innovate at all. Every promise Silicon Valley is making about AI curing disease just hit the one person qualified to check it.
She has spent her whole career inside the actual frontier of curing disease.
So when she talks about what AI can and cannot do in biology, she is not guessing. She is reporting from inside the lab.
Her words were blunt. She is not seeing chatbots innovate. They summarize data. They write reports. They do not come up with a brand new idea nobody has ever had.
Then the interviewer pushed. So you're saying AI can't innovate?
Doudna did not flinch. She does not know if it can't. She just does not see it doing it right now.
This lands harder when you remember who is making the opposite case. Sam Altman says AI will eliminate disease within five years. Larry Ellison says AI will cure cancer in a 48 hour window.
An OpenAI executive even floated that the company should get a cut of sales on any drug discovered through ChatGPT. Doudna answered that in two words. Good luck.
Even the cancer specialists Altman is selling to keep warning that cancer is not one disease but hundreds, each needing its own cure, and that compute does not skip the years of lab work.
Her reason is simpler. Biology is hard. You cannot simulate your way to an understanding of the human body.
The people promising cures are the ones selling the tool.
The person who actually won a Nobel building them is telling you it has not happened yet.
Source: Bloomberg Originals
Watch the full video on their official channel.
I asked #AI to look into the future and send me a picture of my trip to Singapore next week for the AI4X β Accelerate Conference 2026
Looking forward to the speakers, the editorial panel, and of course, some Singapore Slings!
See you next week in Singapore!
Do you use #LLMs to read and summarize the most recent science literature?
What if you HAD to use an LLM to read the article?
New issue, new editorial:
48656C6C6F20576F726C64: An editorial for your favorite LLM
Had a fun time writing (and converting) this one!
Wrote something about managing information overload as a researcher β Python, LLMs, and some habits that have worked for me.
Out in @Matter_CP today.
Hope it's useful to you. π οΌ1/4)
https://t.co/X5YcqinstP
@Matter_CP@EKL_Batteries Oh! same issue has a hidden gem. @cranfordMATTER wrote editorial
entirely in hexadecimal. "Hello World: An editorial for your favorite LLM" Paste it into Claude/ChatGPT to read it.
One of the most creative things I've seen from a journal editor. οΌ3/4)
https://t.co/TgxfkdjSgA
Delighted to see that our Matter paper "Layer-by-layer mechanism of the MAX phase to #MXene transformation", co-authored by 4 former @drexelnano students and post-docs, is among the 2025 Top 10 editorial picks. Work from our team makes an impact!
https://t.co/y8uwlypoVw
Scientists crafted glow-in-the-dark #succulents that recharge in sunlight. Injected with light-emitting phosphor, the plants can shine as bright as a small night light. https://t.co/GXVTp1bqnY
#SCAU Shuting Liu & colleagues
@Matter_CP