Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this two-story, 2.5-hour special sets the table for Nobel Prize Week with deep dives into two recent Nobel-winning domains—gene editing (CRISPR) and gravitational waves (LIGO)—and how AI is accelerating both. We trace CRISPR from bacterial immunity to Stanford’s new “CRISPR-GPT” lab co-pilot, then pivot to how machine learning upgrades are pushing LIGO past its noise limits to capture new classes of gravitational waves.
Summary
• CRISPR, from bacterial immune memory to RNA-programmable genome editing
• The 2012 Science breakthrough: guide RNAs unlock programmable editing
• The patent saga and the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• Stanford’s CRISPR-GPT: an AI “co-pilot” trained on expert lab threads and papers
• Experiment planning, guide design, and safety guardrails for CRISPR-GPT
• Biosecurity and ethical guardrails around AI in biology
• LIGO’s foundations: Einstein’s equations, binary pulsars, and interferometer engineering
• The “noise budget”: seismic, environmental, and quantum limits
• AI-driven denoising and template generation: unlocking earlier inspirals and tougher detections
• Funding, leadership, and the global policy race to keep LIGO competitive
• Big picture: AI as an amplifier of discovery in both medicine and physics
Show Notes