Thank you for sharing, that provided some good context for how to interpret this

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I wish we didn’t need these again, but here is the honest version of Anthropic’s biology announcement (Caveat: I haven’t worked in bioinformatics for many years.) The good: Anthropic ran ~950 Claude agents over a large biological sequence database. Claude searched, wrote code, compared sequences and genomic neighborhoods, and found an interesting pattern that apparently had not been noticed before: a known reverse transcriptase associated with another gene and a repetitive DNA array.

That is cool. Automating this kind of open-ended bioinformatics search at scale is useful, and Claude may have found a lead a human would have missed.

But: Claude did not do a biological experiment. It searched databases and analyzed data.

Humans then took the candidate into the wet lab. And the wet-lab result so far is modest: they showed that the repeat array produces short RNAs.

We still don’t know what the system does. No function, mechanism, phenotype, targeting, defense activity, or programmability has been demonstrated.

This is also where the CRISPR framing gets ahead of the result. Right now, “it has some features reminiscent of known programmable systems” is a hypothesis for what to investigate next, not a discovery that it behaves like CRISPR.

And there is a missing baseline: bioinformatics has had tools for finding unusual gene neighborhoods and candidate systems for years. The interesting comparison is 950 Claude agents vs. an expert using the best existing computational pipelines - not Claude vs. someone manually looking through 200,000 sequences.

So my honest announcement would be:

Claude autonomously found an interesting candidate for a previously uncharacterized biological system. A small human wet-lab experiment confirmed that part of the candidate is expressed. We don’t yet know what it does.

That is a good result.

But in a regular biology lab, this isn’t the finished paper. It is the result you show at lab meeting and say: “This looks interesting. Now we need to figure out what the hell it does.”

Maybe that next step leads to a major discovery. But that discovery hasn’t happened yet.

100% AI per Pangram. I caught it at "This is also where the CRISPR framing gets ahead of the result." -- somehow this is not a sentence anybody non-obnoxious would write. It's a weird structure where the AI talks about something specific as if it were an example of a common theme. This paragraph is an even clearer ekample:

"But in a regular biology lab, this isn’t the finished paper. It is the result you show at lab meeting and say: “This looks interesting. Now we need to figure out what the hell it does.”"

This is not how people write!

I am irked by the CRISPR framing. That seems to be IPO positioning.

Good hypotheses are a dime a dozen in life sciences. Biology is very unforgiving and most hypotheses lead to nothing when thoroughly tested. This is true for something as "simple" as enzymes as in this case, but even more true for curing diseases. Otherwise, there would not be any failures of phase III clinical trials, after billions USD spent on preclinical research and prior clinical trials.

When overinterpreting these (interesting) results, you are entering Andy Grove Fallacy [0] territory very fast.

[0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/andy-grove-rich-fa...

Why does this read so much like Claude talking about Claude?

A more spicy follow up take :) https://x.com/ziv_ravid/status/2102850969537225149

> The sad thing is that Dario knows better.

He was a PhD student. He knows the significance level of this result. He knows that if he had walked into Bill’s office (his advisor) with “we found an interesting system, but we still don’t know what it does” and said he was ready to graduate, Bill would have kicked him out of the room.

But somehow, when the IPO is around the corner, this becomes “AI is starting to drive biological discovery.”