TED Talks Daily - How AI could generate new life-forms | Eric Nguyen

Episode Date: August 25, 2025

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.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Toyota, for what matters most. This episode is sponsored by Airbnb. A few years ago, I went to Vancouver for work, and I remember sneaking in a little time to wander Granville Island and grab something from the public market. It reminded me how much I love discovering new corners of Canada with Airbnb. Because let's be honest, when you're traveling with kids, sometimes you just need a kitchen at 6 a.m.

That's one of the things I love about Airbnb. You actually get to settle in. We can have breakfast together around a table, put the kids to bed in real bedrooms and still stay up with my partner after. That's the kind of setup that makes trips in Canada so much more fun. You're not just getting a place to sleep, you're getting experiences that feel authentically yours, whether it's a lakeside cabin in Bruce Peninsula where you can literally roll out of bed and into a canoe or a cozy spot in Cape Breton where you can make your morning coffee and watch the sunrise

without anyone rushing you to check out. This summer, when you're planning those trips that matter, the ones where you want to actually connect with your loved ones, check out some of the most loved homes across Canada on Airbnb. This episode is sponsored by Colgate Periogard. Most of us keep our homes stocked with first aid supplies for cuts and scrapes, bandages, ointments, the works. But when our gums bleed or feel inflamed, we tend to brush it off, literally. The thing is, those could be early signs of gum disease, and like the rest of our health, our gums deserve attention to. Use Colgate Periogard to significantly reduce gum bleeding and inflammation. It helps fight bacteria

that can lead to early gum disease and improves gum health with daily use. Just like you'd take care of a scraped knee next time your gums feel sensitive, don't ignore it. Help take care of it like you do anything else. Colgate Periogard, healthy gums, confident smile. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. When you think about AI literally generating new DNA, does that thrill you or scare you? For bioengineer and genomic AI pioneer, Eric Nguyen, it's a little bit of both. But for him, the possibilities of unlocking new medicines and curing diseases, among other things, makes it worth the risk. In his talk, he shares

how looking at DNA as a language when the AI can learn to read, 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. A biologist will learn how a car works by poking at it. by poking at it, removing one part at a time and seeing how it affects the rest of the car. On the other hand, an engineer will learn how a car works

by taking it completely apart and rebuilding it. Take, for example, the Human Genome Project, one of the biggest breakthroughs of the last century. We spent over a decade mapping out all three billion letters of our genome, the complete set of DNA. We thought that once we could read DNA and apply that same principle, poking and dissecting one letter at a time,

that we can start eradicating all human diseases. But instead, we began to realize just how little we actually understood about the true function of DNA. As a researcher, I work on artificial intelligence and trained as an engineer. I learned by building things, and understand by creating.

Today, I want to share an idea that can fundamentally change how we study biology and life itself. Instead of just reading and dissecting DNA, we should be generating it, and we can do this by treating DNA as a language, one that AI can learn to read, write, and ultimately build.

This idea led myself and a team of researchers at Stanford and the ARC Institute with a sort of moonshot. Can we generate an entire genome from scratch using AI? Build life from the ground up. Now, I understand the thought of feeding the code of life into a generative AI is both thrilling, and perhaps unsettling. But I came to realize that if this was possible,

it could unlock some of the most powerful breakthroughs in science and medicine. But I'll be honest, we had no idea if AI could actually generate DNA. In many ways, DNA is like a language. It has grammar, structure, sort of like sentences and paragraphs that grouped together to form a story.

And these stories are passed down through evolution, generation by generation. For humans, it's been hard to comprehend these stories written in DNA, in large part because of its scale. DNA is extremely long, and yet at the same time, sensitive to the smallest mistakes. Imagine trying to write something the length of 30,000 books in a foreign language.

and that when you're off by a single letter, one of billions, this can mean the difference between a healthy person and a person with a life-threatening disease. And so, to tackle these challenges, together with my colleague, Michael Polly, we developed an AI that could generate extremely long sequences of DNA

500 times longer than previous AI models at high levels of detail. We assembled a team of scientists and AI experts and gathered the largest collection of DNA used to train AI. 80,000 whole genomes fed into a model that we called Evo. And our goal was to create something like a chat chvety for DNA, where you can prompt Evo and describe the DNA you want, and it would generate new sequences one letter at a time.

But there is one key difference. With chatbots, you can just read what it writes, and you can decide if it makes sense to you. With DNA, it's not so simple. It's not an intuitive human language. How do you know if it's any real or good? What does that even mean? What we needed was a test,

a way to verify that what it wrote would actually function. And so we started with a familiar, a tool in biology called CRISPR. CRISPR is like a pair of molecular scissors that can edit DNA, used for things like gene therapy. We asked Evo to make its own and generate its own version of CRISPR from scratch, which had never been done before. It's got proteins and RNA inside.

It's a complex system. And so our biologists would take that generated DNA and analyze it to see how realistic, Does it look? Does it resemble something in nature? How do its proteins fold? Which all give us the sense of its function. But ultimately, we have to test their ability to cut DNA by actually building them in the lab. And so that's what we did.

Now, waiting for lab results can sometimes be a nerve-wracking experience. Honestly, it's kind of like waiting for the results of a pregnancy test. You're excited, anxious and hopeful for a positive outcome. And then all of a sudden, these two little lines appear. Just to be crystal, crystal clear, these two lines are a good thing. That's what we want. It means that our crisper's cut a single strand of DNA into two

in the exact right spot, just like natural crisper's in the lab. And so that's when we knew. It worked. Evo-generated DNA that not only looked realistic, but that actually functioned. And so next, we decided to go for that moonshot to try and generate a whole genome from scratch.

And Evo was able to generate hundreds of synthetic proteins in a genome that resembled those in nature. But ultimately, he was missing a few parts. It wasn't yet complete. More like a rough sketch of the genome. However, this is just the first version. That rough sketch of the genome will become more detailed over time. In fact, within years, we anticipate AI

will be able to generate whole functional genomes. In other words, AI will be able to generate new life. As this technology improves, biology will shift from discovery to design. What might this world look like? Let's look ahead. In this future, we can make truly personalized medicine. Imagine prompting an AI, like Evo, with your genome,

finding sources of diseases, predicting your reaction to drugs, and guiding treatment options based on your own DNA. But why even take medicine when you might have a permanent cure? We might choose to alter our DNA outright, and we are beginning to see this today. Recently, the FDA approved the first gene therapy for sickle cell disease, a painful, lifelong condition of the blood,

and it works by just changing a single gene in a person's DNA to permanently cure the patient. And now, there are over 500 DNA-altering treatments awaiting approval. But let's say you're not comfortable with changing your DNA. What if we added new DNA? All of our DNA is organized into 23 pairs of chromosomes, chapters, if you will, in the book that is our genome. What if evil learned to generate a 24th chapter?

A whole new chromosome equipped with all the machinery needed to fight hundreds of diseases on demand. With DNA generation, what is the limit of what's possible? We've all seen Jurassic Park. We all thought it was science fiction, and it is. Mostly, researchers are now reconstructing the genomes of extinct species, with one company planning to resurrect the woolly mammoth by as early as 2028.

Now, instead of bringing back extinct species, can we create new ones? Researchers are now engineering microbes for colonizing Mars. If we one day wish to be a multi-planetary species, we'd have to figure out how to grow things on Mars, make it more hospitable and possibly terraform. And it is possible we have microbes on Earth that can handle a range of extreme conditions

that we call extremophiles. Now, I understand some of these things might sound scary. One of the biggest concerns is biosecurity, the potential to create bioweapons. Can AI be used to generate more infectious viruses? Yes. But AI can also defend and monitor against these threats as well. And so perhaps you feel like me

and that you have to choose between advocating for innovation versus safety, I'd encourage you to embrace both because stopping progress entirely I don't think it's practical. We need to evolve with the technology, monitor its capabilities, and constantly be asking ourselves what possible futures are we enabling?

As humans, we've always sought to understand the world around us. That is in our nature. but understanding alone has rarely been enough. For centuries, we've studied life by observing and dissecting it. But now, we're no longer just reading life's code. We now have the power to generate it. And with AI, we're at the beginning of unlocking new medicines,

science, and even entire new forms of life. Do we make small edits? Do we write entirely new chapters? Or do we one day design life itself? Because to truly understand biology, we must create it. In the future of life, it's ours to build. Thank you. That was Eric Nguyen at TED 2025.

If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonicaa Sung Marnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisi Bogan. additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balezzo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. This episode is sponsored by Airbnb.

A few years ago, I went to Vancouver for work, and I remember sneaking in a little time to wander Granville Island and grab something from the public market. It reminded me how much I love discovering new corporations. of Canada with Airbnb. Because let's be honest, when you're traveling with kids, sometimes you just need a kitchen at 6 a.m. That's one of the things I love about Airbnb. You actually get to settle in. We can have breakfast together around a table, put the kids to bed in real bedrooms, and still stay up with my partner after. That's the kind of setup that makes trips in

Canada so much more fun. You're not just getting a place to sleep. You're getting experiences that feel authentically yours, whether it's a lakeside cabin in Bruce Peninsula where you can roll out of bed and into a canoe or a cozy spot in Cape Breton where you can make your morning coffee and watch the sunrise without anyone rushing you to check out. This summer, when you're planning those trips that matter, the ones where you want

to actually connect with your loved ones, check out some of the most loved homes across Canada on Airbnb. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. Fizz is 100% on So you can make the switch in minutes.

Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Our homes are ready for any kind of cuts. We have bandages, sprays, gels to treat them. But we're quick to ignore gum bleeding and inflammation. We brush it off, literally. Use Colgate periogard to significantly reduce gum bleeding and inflammation.

It helps fight bacteria that can lead to early gum disease and improves gum health with daily use. So, the next time your gums feel sensitive, don't ignore it. Take care of it with Colgate Periogard, healthy gums, confident smile.