Jay Wang, welcome to Disconnected.

Hello, everyone.

Thank you for inviting me on to Disconnected, and I'm very excited to be on here today.

And I guess let me just start by asking everybody the question I want to put out today, which is what happens when generative AI stops generating words and pictures and starts designing things that are meant to interact with the human body? Because I'm sure most of us have used AI to write an email, make an image, conduct some research, or even coding.

But over the last few years, the same kind of technology has quietly moved into biology and chemistry.

And that shift is what I want to be talking about today.

For all of history, making medicine worked by searching, and scientists would screen thousands of natural compounds and they could only hope that one of them would have the function they wanted.

When you've designed something on a computer, which is a perfect new folding protein, which binds to a receptor in the body, what do you then do? Do you then go and have you got the code for that? And then have you got like tanks of ribosomes in a lab? How does it work?