The reason why we're hearing from Samuel today is because last year, using AI, he and his colleagues produced functional viral genome designs and used them to create bacterial phages that can kill drug-resistant bacteria.

We used a very safe laboratory strain of E. coli called E. coli C.

This is the host strain for a, a very classic bacteriophage called Phi X 174, which is the first DNA genome ever sequenced.

For decades, people have been studying Phi X 174 to understand a lot of basic things about, um, how genomes work.

We used the strain E. coli C as our host strain for the generated phages because we were trying to generate phages that looked like Phi X 174.

And since we don't really have the evaluation metrics to determine what that actually should be, uh, we had to work off of what we do know, which is what a natural bacteriophage looks like.

And so Phi X 174, because of its historical precedent and safety, um, made a lot of sense as kind of a reference point for what we should use to, to determine our design criteria.

What does it mean to be a scientist today when things are moving so quickly? What's he learning about how science itself is actually changing?