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Reporting and discussion about Science & Medicine, with links to the original sources.
Daniel McKinnon, whose son died of a rare lung disease, built an AI pipeline that rediscovered a deletion a lab had missed and a specialist later found. His four-month-old Gamow Labs now uses AI agents to reanalyse unresolved genomes.
Colossal CEO Ben Lamm doesn't expect technology to bring back everything that ever lived, and says his company won't work on humans. He says choosing species means weighing ecology and Indigenous views, and mistakes will happen.
Colossal CEO Ben Lamm says George Church's case that mammoth herds could cool the Arctic is disputed, including inside Colossal. He argues 10,000-plus mammoths would help the degraded tundra either way.
Colossal CEO Ben Lamm says governments must spend billions to freeze samples of species, citing his projection that half of biodiversity will be lost in 25 years. Colossal describes a Dubai biovault plan and has a U.S. agreement that does not obligate federal spending.
Colossal CEO Ben Lamm says frontier AI can't read one genome and prescribe fixes. For three to five years, he sees it bridging messy research papers and designing experiments. He argues large comparative genome data sets matter more than models.
Colossal CEO Ben Lamm says the company delivers 300+ genetic edits at once and is testing 1,000. He forecasts designing key traits in basic organisms within a decade. These are his own company claims, not independently verified.
Colossal Biosciences CEO Ben Lamm says the company will likely birth mammals fully outside a womb within 24 months. Its announced results so far are chicks from an artificial egg and marsupial embryos grown past mid-pregnancy.
Peter Diamandis says Palmer Luckey is funding a new $10M XPRIZE, due to be announced about a month after their September 25 talk. Luckey says it will reward communicating with wild animals 10 times better than today's best; rules are undisclosed.
Hosts on Moonshots welcomed FutureHouse and Edison Scientific's 12 lab-testable "Millennium Problems for Biology." Peter Diamandis said age reversal, left off the list, is measurable in days, though his XPRIZE Healthspan uses year-long trials.
Eon Systems co-founder Alex Wissner-Gross said he backs "uploading" fruit flies but opposes making them day-trade Bitcoin or play Doom. Neither Google's fly wiring map nor Eon's simplified simulation shows a virtual fly can suffer.
Google DeepMind's AlphaGenome Atlas precomputes predicted molecular effects of every possible single-letter change in the human genome. A Moonshots panelist cautioned that what combinations of variants mean still needs outcome data.
In an exploratory analysis of 42 lung-fibrosis patients, AI-designed drug rentosertib made protein aging clocks read about three years younger by week four. Mortality clocks didn't significantly shift at 60 mg, and the effect plateaued by week 12.