Meanwhile, in a California biology lab…

Artificial Intelligence used to design brand new viruses bbc.co.uk

Researchers handed a genome-writing AI the job of designing viruses from scratch, then built them. Sixteen of the resulting bacteriophages worked — assembled, infected bacteria, replicated. It is the first time a functioning organism-scale genome has come out of a model rather than out of evolution, and the biosecurity questions arrived the same day.