Feb 20, 2025
A scientific mystery that took 10 years to solve was cracked in two days by Google’s artificial intelligence.
The tech giant’s latest AI development is dubbed “co-scientist” and is designed to act as a colleague for researchers, with its own ideas, theories and analysis.
Scientists at Imperial College London had spent a decade solving a mystery in the field of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which creates superbugs that are immune to antibiotics and are expected to kill millions of people a year by 2050.
Using traditional research methods, the team had theorised and then proved how different bacteria are able to accrue new DNA which can make them more dangerous, and its study is now in the process of being published by Cell, the peer-reviewed journal.
After the work was finished, the scientists at Imperial partnered with Google to help test out the AI co-scientist feature.
The researchers asked the co-scientist – which uses many of Google’s Gemini AI models to pit various existing data and novel theories against each other – for ideas on how bacteria become immune to antibiotics.
Speed and accuracy of results ‘quite shocking’
Prof José Penadés, who co-led the experimental work at Imperial, told The Telegraph: “We worked for many years to understand this thing and we found the mechanism.
“Capsids (the protein shell of a virus) are produced with DNA inside and no tails. They have the ability to take a tail from different viruses and affect different species.”
While the team knew about this tail-gathering process, nobody else in the world did. Imperial’s revelations were private, there was nothing publicly available, and nothing was written online about it.
The scientists then asked the co-scientist AI, using a couple of written sentences, if it had any ideas as to how the bacteria operated.
Two days later, the AI made its own suggestions, which included what the Imperial scientists knew to be the right answer.
“This was the top one, it was the first hypothesis it suggested. It was, as you can imagine, quite shocking,” said Prof Penad és. READ MORE
CREDIT - Joe Pinkstone / The Telegraph