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Patrick Hsu, co-founder of the Arc Institute, speaks during the STAT Breakthrough Summit West in San Francisco Thursday. Sarah Gonzalez for STAT

In 2018, during her chemistry Nobel Prize lecture, Frances Arnold noted that scientists had arrived at a point where they could read, write, and edit any sequence of DNA. But composing whole genes or even whole genomes from scratch — that was something only evolution could do.

A few years later, not long after helping to launch the Arc Institute, a nonprofit research center in the Bay Area, molecular engineer Patrick Hsu wondered if it was possible to imitate the forces of evolution that Arnold had been referring to. DNA is a language, after all, and with all the advances in generative AI — chatbots that could hold eerily lifelike conversations if trained on enough text — maybe recreating all the cellular complexity contained in a genome wasn’t that far behind.

Working with Brian Hie, a computational biologist at Stanford University and a fellow Arc Institute member, Hsu, who is also an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, began assembling a team of scientists to train an AI model on vast troves of biological data — 300 billion DNA letters, including long sequences from 80,000 genomes of bacteria and archaea.

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