Studying the cell is a difficult and time-consuming process, but scientists have pinpointed generative AI as a potential way to make it easier.
The idea is to develop an AI virtual cell that would behave the same way a real cell does. This would allow researchers to do medical experiments on the computer rather than on a live cell, making the process more efficient and affordable.
Improving our understanding of the cell could be ground-breaking for public health. The problem: "Experimenting in this microscopic realm can be a kind of guesswork; even success is frequently confounding," said The Atlantic.
But technology now offers "opportunities to create an AI virtual cell, a multi-scale, multi-modal, large-neural-network-based model that can represent and simulate the behaviour of molecules, cells and tissues across diverse states", said an article published in the journal Cell. An AI model could even have the ability to simulate entire organs.
While there are clear benefits to this technology, generative AI also has its drawbacks. It has been shown to reinforce humanity's implicit biases, especially in regard to gender and race. "Data from humans and model organisms, such as mice and Escherichia coli, are unequally represented in sequence and literature databases, which, when used for training, encode strong species biases," said the Cell article. "Other biases, for example, in terms of sex, specific diseases or human ancestral populations, could also reduce the impact of (AI virtual cell) models." | 
