Anthropic presented its own biology lab and showed its first result: a system built around a reverse transcriptase in phages, next to an array of evenly spaced DNA repeats. What it does is not yet known. The preprint is out.
- The agents gathered over 200,000 reverse transcriptases, picked out 3,500 candidates and wrote up the 20 most interesting.
- The new system, called ART, has three parts: the enzyme, a neighbouring gene of unknown function and a long array of repeats.
- All lab work is done by scientists, in a lab with low biosafety levels and no human pathogens.
“[The DNA next to the RT] is spectacular: I can see by eye a tandem repeat array … that's a CRISPR-like … repeat array?!”
That is what one of the agents wrote while reading the raw DNA next to an odd-looking gene. Anthropic quotes it in its announcement and does not hide it, because at that moment the machine does what a scientist usually does: it notices a pattern that should not be there.
What the agent saw
The speed is expected, however impressive: twenty-one hours against weeks and months of human work. The more interesting part is that the agent chose on its own to look closer at something nobody had pointed it to, checked whether it had been described, and wrote a report for human review.
And just as important is what did not happen. The system's function is unknown. It is not a drug, not a tool, not a new CRISPR. For now it is a strange pattern in the DNA of a virus that infects bacteria, and first experiments showing the array is expressed as distinct short RNAs.
The answer will come from the peer-reviewed version and from other people's labs. If ART turns out to be programmable like CRISPR, this date will be remembered. If not, the proof remains that a machine can notice.