Asimov Press

This was a little over my head so I did some digging of course into the negative or potential harmful effects:

Covert biological manipulation: If cells in specific organisms (including people) are engineered to respond to particular light patterns, then light could be used as a trigger to turn on harmful genes or disrupt normal biology in targeted groups, raising concerns about new classes of biological or “neuro” weapons.

Military and control applications: In combination with existing neurotechnology and optogenetics work (e.g., brain interfaces and neural stimulation), there are concerns about using light‑controlled genetic tools for enhancement, interrogation, or behavior influence in military or intelligence settings.

Ethical and societal risks:

Autonomy, consent, and “mind control” worries: Optogenetics already raises concerns about manipulating brain activity, permanence of genetic changes, informed consent, and vulnerability of specific populations once their cells are engineered to respond to light. GO intensifies this by linking genetic programming directly to external optical signals, which magnifies fears of remote influence or coercive use.

Safety, equity, and regulation: There are unresolved questions about long‑term safety, off‑target effects, error rates in in‑cell DNA/RNA synthesis, and who gets access to beneficial applications versus who is exposed to risk, all in a regulatory landscape that is still catching up with advanced gene and…

I have been diving into / reading up this area lately. A few quick notes.

This isn't the first time an algorithm even a generative algorithm has been used to create a phage. But this isn't the first time an organism or a subunit has been designed via algorithm, I'm fairly sure that this isn't even the first time a phage has been designed via algorithm.

Based on my quick reading, the BBC article doesn't bring up a prior publication / release from 2025 called "AI-Designed Phages," https://www.asimov.press/p/ai-phages

But re: algorithm builds life. There's an entire sub-field / world here that goes back decades. The first synthetic organism was Venter's mycoplasma laboratorium / Synthia in 2010.

The first organism to be synthetically assembled (not completely designed, but assembled) was a phage in 2003 also by Venter & co.

In 2021 another team made entities that can "find and combine building blocks into self-copies," Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8670470/

Then there are the algorithmically designed synthetic life / "xenobots" by Google / Alphabet in 2019 / 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/science/xenobots-robots-frogs-xenopus.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobot

Zurich in 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20191008040536/https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-04/ez-fbg032819.php

And if you expand computing to include molecular processes, there's stuff like PACE,…

I listened to that book and enjoyed it. But that said, I'm torn between friendliness to the general concept, and skepticism based in part on the bias of proponents to deeply desire plants to display something like intelligence (a bias I share).

For example the most amazing claims in the book were around the ability of Boquila trifoliolata to dynamically mimic other plants.

see this old HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31301454

But when one looks more closely the research, the behavior isn't as dramatic as Zoe made it sound, and the research may not be so strong, e.g. :

https://press.asimov.com/articles/plant-vision

https://archive.today/XbhBs

Org: https://www.innovateanimalag.org/

Related: https://press.asimov.com/articles/before-they-hatch

Discovered: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-may-2024