Microsoft says AI can create “zero day” threats in biology

A team at Microsoft says it used artificial intelligence to discover a “zero day” vulnerability in the biosecurity systems used to prevent the misuse of DNA.

These screening systems are designed to stop people from purchasing genetic sequences that could be used to create deadly toxins or pathogens. But now researchers led by Microsoft’s chief scientist, Eric Horvitz, says they have figured out how to bypass the protections in a way previously unknown to defenders. 

The team described its work today in the journal Science.

Horvitz and his team focused on generative AI algorithms that propose new protein shapes. These types of programs are already fueling the hunt for new drugs at well-funded startups like Generate Biomedicines and Isomorphic Labs, a spinout of Google. 

The problem is that such systems are potentially “dual use.” They can use their training sets to generate both beneficial molecules and harmful ones.

Microsoft says it began a “red-teaming” test of AI’s dual-use potential in 2023 in order to determine whether “adversarial AI protein design” could help bioterrorists manufacture harmful proteins. 

The safeguard that Microsoft attacked is what’s known as biosecurity screening software. To manufacture a protein, researchers typically need to order a corresponding DNA sequence from a commercial vendor, which they can then install in a cell. Those vendors use screening software to compare incoming orders with known toxins or pathogens. A close match will set off an alert.

To design its attack, Microsoft used several generative protein models (including its own, called EvoDiff) to redesign toxins—changing their structure in a way that let them slip past screening software but was predicted to keep their deadly function intact.

The researchers say the exercise was entirely digital and they never produced any toxic proteins. That was to avoid any perception that the company was developing bioweapons. 

Before publishing the results, Microsoft says, it alerted the US government and software makers, who’ve already patched their systems, although some AI-designed molecules can still escape detection. 

“The patch is incomplete, and the state of the art is changing. But this isn’t a one-and-done thing. It’s the start of even more testing,” says Adam Clore, director of technology R&D at Integrated DNA Technologies, a large manufacturer of DNA, who is a coauthor on the Microsoft report. “We’re in something of an arms race.”

To make sure nobody misuses the research, the researchers say, they’re not disclosing some of their code and didn’t reveal what toxic proteins they asked the AI to redesign. However, some dangerous proteins are well known, like ricin—a poison found in castor beans—and the infectious prions that are the cause of mad-cow disease.

“This finding, combined with rapid advances in AI-enabled biological modeling, demonstrates the clear and urgent need for enhanced nucleic acid synthesis screening procedures coupled with a reliable enforcement and verification mechanism,” says Dean Ball, a fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, a think tank in San Francisco.

Ball notes that the US government already considers screening of DNA orders a key line of security. Last May, in an executive order on biological research safety, President Trump called for an overall revamp of that system, although so far the White House hasn’t released new recommendations.

Others doubt that commercial DNA synthesis is the best point of defense against bad actors. Michael Cohen, an AI-safety researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, believes there will always be ways to disguise sequences and that Microsoft could have made its test harder.

“The challenge appears weak, and their patched tools fail a lot,” says Cohen. “There seems to be an unwillingness to admit that sometime soon, we’re going to have to retreat from this supposed choke point, so we should start looking around for ground that we can actually hold.” 

Cohen says biosecurity should probably be built into the AI systems themselves—either directly or via controls over what information they give. 

But Clore says monitoring gene synthesis is still a practical approach to detecting biothreats, since the manufacture of DNA in the US is dominated by a few companies that work closely with the government. By contrast, the technology used to build and train AI models is more widespread. “You can’t put that genie back in the bottle,” says Clore. “If you have the resources to try to trick us into making a DNA sequence, you can probably train a large language model.”

Trump is pushing leucovorin as a new treatment for autism. What is it?

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.

At a press conference on Monday, President Trump announced that his administration was taking action to address “the meteoric rise in autism.” He suggested that childhood vaccines and acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, are to blame for the increasing prevalence and advised pregnant women against taking the medicine. “Don’t take Tylenol,” he said. “Fight like hell not to take it.” 

The president’s  assertions left many scientists and health officials perplexed and dismayed. The notion that childhood vaccines cause autism has been thoroughly debunked

“There have been many, many studies across many, many children that have led science to rule out vaccines as a significant causal factor in autism,” says James McPartland, a child psychologist and director of the Yale Center for Brain and Mind Health in New Haven, Connecticut.

And although some studies suggest a link between Tylenol and autism, the most rigorous have failed to find a connection. 

The administration also announced that the Food and Drug Administration would work to make a medication called leucovorin available as a treatment for children with autism. Some small studies do suggest the drug has promise, but “those are some of the most preliminary treatment studies that we have,” says Matthew Lerner, a psychologist at Drexel University’s A.J. Drexel Autism Institute in Philadelphia. “This is not one I would say that the research suggests is ready for fast-tracking.” 

The press conference “alarms us researchers who committed our entire careers to better understanding autism,” said the Coalition for Autism Researchers, a group of more than 250 scientists, in a statement.

“The data cited do not support the claim that Tylenol causes autism and leucovorin is a cure, and only stoke fear and falsely suggest hope when there is no simple answer.”

There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s begin. 

Has there been a “meteoric rise” in autism?

Not in the way the president meant. Sure, the prevalence of autism has grown, from about 1 in 500 children in 1995 to 1 in 31 today. But that’s due, in large part, to diagnostic changes. The latest iteration of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illnesses, published in 2013, grouped five previously separate diagnoses into a single diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

That meant that more people met the criteria for an autism diagnosis. Lerner points out that there is also far more awareness of the condition today than there was several decades ago. “There’s autism representation in the media,” he says. “There are plenty of famous people in the news and finance and in business and in Hollywood who are publicly, openly autistic.”

Is Tylenol a contributor to autism? 

Some studies have found an association between the use of acetaminophen in pregnancy and autism in children. In these studies, researchers asked women about past acetaminophen use during pregnancy and then assessed whether children of the women who took the medicine were more likely to develop autism than children of women who didn’t take it. 

These kinds of epidemiological studies are tricky to interpret because they’re prone to bias. For example, women who take acetaminophen during pregnancy may do so because they have an infection, a fever, or an autoimmune disease.

“Many of these underlying reasons could themselves be causes of autism,” says Ian Douglas, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It’s also possible women with a higher genetic predisposition for autism have other medical conditions that make them more likely to take acetaminophen. 

Two studies attempted to account for these potential biases by looking at siblings whose mothers had used acetaminophen during only one of the pregnancies. The largest is a 2024 study that looked at nearly 2.5 million children born between 1915 and 2019 in Sweden. The researchers initially found a slightly increased risk of autism and ADHD in children of the women who took acetaminophen, but when they conducted a sibling analysis, the association disappeared.  

Rather, scientists have long known that autism is largely genetic. Twin studies suggest that 60% to 90% of autism risk can be attributed to your genes. However, environmental factors appear to play a role too. That “doesn’t necessarily mean toxins in the environment,” Lerner says. In fact, one of the strongest environmental predictors of autism is paternal age. Autism rates seem to be higher when a child’s father is older than 40.

So should someone who is pregnant  avoid Tylenol just to be safe?

No. Acetaminophen is the only over-the-counter pain reliever that is deemed safe to take during pregnancy, and women should take it if they need it. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) supports the use of acetaminophen in pregnancy “when taken as needed, in moderation, and after consultation with a doctor.” 

“There’s no downside in not taking it,” Trump said at the press conference. But high fevers during pregnancy can be dangerous. “The conditions people use acetaminophen to treat during pregnancy are far more dangerous than any theoretical risks and can create severe morbidity and mortality for the pregnant person and the fetus,” ACOG president Steven Fleischman said in a statement.

What about this new treatment for autism? Does it work? 

The medication is called leucovorin. It’s also known as folinic acid; like folic acid, it’s a form of folate, a B vitamin found in leafy greens and legumes. The drug has been used for years to counteract the side effects of some cancer medications and as a treatment for anemia. 

Researchers have known for decades that folate plays a key role in the fetal development of the brain and spine. Women who don’t get enough folate during pregnancy have a greater risk of having babies with neural tube defects like spina bifida. Because of this, many foods are fortified with folic acid, and the CDC recommends that women take folic acid supplements during pregnancy. “If you are pregnant and you’re taking maternal prenatal vitamins, there’s a good chance it has folate already,” Lerner says.

“The idea that a significant proportion of autistic people have autism because of folate-related difficulties is not a well established or widely accepted premise,” says McPartland.

However, in the early 2000s, researchers in Germany identified a small group of children who developed neurodevelopmental symptoms because of a folate deficiency. “These kids are born pretty normal at birth,” says Edward Quadros, a biologist at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, New York. But after a year or two, “they start developing a neurologic presentation very similar to autism,” he says. When the researchers gave these children folinic acid, some of their symptoms improved, especially in children younger than six. 

Because the children had low levels of folate in the fluid that surrounds the spine and brain but normal folate levels in the blood, the researchers posited that the problem was the transport of folate from the blood to that fluid. Research by Quadros and other scientists suggested that the deficiency was the result of an autoimmune response. Children develop antibodies against the receptors that help transport folate, and those antibodies block folate from crossing the blood-brain barrier. High doses of folinic acid, however, activate a second transporter that allows folate in, Quadros says. 

There are also plenty of individual anecdotes suggesting that leucovorin works. But the medicine has only been tested as a treatment for autism in four small trials that used different doses and measured different outcomes. The evidence that it can improve symptoms of autism is “weak,” according to the Coalition of Autism Scientists. “A much higher standard of science would be needed to determine if leucovorin is an effective and safe treatment for autism,” the researchers said in a statement.  

A pivotal meeting on vaccine guidance is underway—and former CDC leaders are alarmed

This week has been an eventful one for America’s public health agency. Two former leaders of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explained the reasons for their sudden departures from the agency in a Senate hearing. And they described how CDC employees are being instructed to turn their backs on scientific evidence.

The CDC’s former director Susan Monarez and former chief medical officer Debra Houry took questions from a Senate committee on Wednesday. They painted a picture of a health agency in turmoil—and at risk of harming the people it is meant to serve.

On Thursday, an advisory CDC panel that develops vaccine guidance met for a two-day discussion on multiple childhood vaccines. During the meeting, which was underway as The Checkup went to press, members of the panel were set to discuss those vaccines and propose recommendations on their use.

Monarez worries that access to childhood vaccines is under threat—and that the public health consequences could be dire. “If vaccine protections are weakened, preventable diseases will return,” she said.

As the current secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. oversees federal health and science agencies that include the CDC, which monitors and responds to threats to public health. Part of that role involves developing vaccine recommendations.

As we’ve noted before, RFK Jr. has long been a prominent critic of vaccines. He has incorrectly linked commonly used ingredients to autism and made other incorrect statements about risks associated with various vaccines.

Still, he oversaw the recruitment of Monarez—who does not share those beliefs—to lead the agency. When she was sworn in on July 31, Monarez, who is a microbiologist and immunologist, had already been serving as acting director of the agency. She had held prominent positions at other federal agencies and departments too, including the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). Kennedy described her as “a public health expert with unimpeachable scientific credentials.”

His opinion seems to have changed somewhat since then. Just 29 days after Monarez took on her position, she was turfed out of the agency. And in yesterday’s hearing, she explained why.

On August 25, Kennedy asked Monarez to do two things, she said. First, he wanted her to commit to firing scientists at the agency. And second, he wanted her to “pre-commit” to approve vaccine recommendations made by the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), regardless of whether there was any scientific evidence to support those recommendations, she said. “He just wanted blanket approval,” she said during her testimony

She refused both requests.

Monarez testified that she didn’t want to get rid of hardworking scientists who played an important role in keeping Americans safe. And she said she could not commit to approving vaccine recommendations without reviewing the scientific evidence behind them and maintain her integrity. She was sacked.

Those vaccine recommendations are currently under discussion, and scientists like Monarez are worried about how they might change. Kennedy fired all 17 members of the previous committee in June. (Monarez said she was not consulted on the firings and found out about them through media reports.)

“A clean sweep is needed to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science,” Kennedy wrote in a piece for the Wall Street Journal at the time. He went on to replace those individuals with eight new members, some of whom have been prominent vaccine critics and have spread misinformation about vaccines. One later withdrew.

That new panel met two weeks later. The meeting included a presentation about thimerosal—a chemical that Kennedy has incorrectly linked to autism, and which is no longer included in vaccines in the US—and a proposal to recommend that the MMRV vaccine (for measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella) not be offered to children under the age of four.

Earlier this week, five new committee members were named. They include individuals who have advocated against vaccine mandates and who have argued that mRNA-based covid vaccines should be removed from the market.

All 12 members are convening for a meeting that runs today and tomorrow. At that meeting, members will propose recommendations for the MMRV vaccine and vaccines for covid-19 and hepatitis B, according to an agenda published on the CDC website.

Those are the recommendations for which Monarez says she was asked to provide “blanket approval.” “My worst fear is that I would then be in a position of approving something that reduces access [to] lifesaving vaccines to children and others who need them,” she said.

That job now goes to Jim O’Neill, the deputy health secretary and acting CDC director (also a longevity enthusiast), who now holds the authority to approve those recommendations.

We don’t yet know what those recommendations will be. But if they are approved, they could reshape access to vaccines for children and vulnerable people in the US. As six former chairs of the committee wrote for STAT: “ACIP is directly linked to the Vaccines for Children program, which provides vaccines without cost to approximately 50% of children in the US, and the Affordable Care Act that requires insurance coverage for ACIP-recommended vaccines to approximately 150 million people in the US.”

Drops in vaccine uptake have already contributed to this year’s measles outbreak in the US, which is the biggest in decades. Two children have died. We are already seeing the impact of undermined trust in childhood vaccines. As Monarez put it: “The stakes are not theoretical.”

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

AI-designed viruses are here and already killing bacteria

Artificial intelligence can draw cat pictures and write emails. Now the same technology can compose a working genome.

A research team in California says it used AI to propose new genetic codes for viruses—and managed to get several of these viruses to replicate and kill bacteria.

The scientists, based at Stanford University and the nonprofit Arc Institute, both in Palo Alto, say the germs with AI-written DNA represent the “the first generative design of complete genomes.”

The work, described in a preprint paper, has the potential to create new treatments and accelerate research into artificially engineered cells. It is also an “impressive first step” toward AI-designed life forms, says Jef Boeke, a biologist at NYU Langone Health, who was provided an advance copy of the paper by MIT Technology Review.  

Boeke says the AI’s performance was surprisingly good and that its ideas were unexpected. “They saw viruses with new genes, with truncated genes, and even different gene orders and arrangements,” he says.

This is not yet AI-designed life, however. That’s because viruses are not alive. They’re more like renegade bits of genetic code with relatively puny, simple genomes. 

In the new work, researchers at the Arc Institute sought to develop variants of a bacteriophage—a virus that infects bacteria—called phiX174, which has only 11 genes and about 5,000 DNA letters.

To do so, they used two versions of an AI called Evo, which works on the same principles as large language models like ChatGPT. Instead of feeding them textbooks and blog posts to learn from, the scientists trained the models on the genomes of about 2 million other bacteriophage viruses.

But would the genomes proposed by the AI make any sense? To find out, the California researchers chemically printed 302 of the genome designs as DNA strands and then mixed those with E. coli bacteria.

That led to a profound “AI is here” moment when, one night, the scientists saw plaques of dead bacteria in their petri dishes. They later took microscope pictures of the tiny viral particles, which look like fuzzy dots.

“That was pretty striking, just actually seeing, like, this AI-generated sphere,” says Brian Hie, who leads the lab at the Arc Institute where the work was carried out.

Overall, 16 of the 302 designs ended up working—that is, the computer-designed phage started to replicate, eventually bursting through the bacteria and killing them.

J. Craig Venter, who created some of the first organisms with lab-made DNA nearly two decades ago, says the AI methods look to him like “just a faster version of trial-and-error experiments.”

For instance, when a team he led managed to create a bacterium with a lab-printed genome in 2008, it was after a long hit-or-miss process of testing out different genes. “We did the manual AI version—combing through the literature, taking what was known,” he says. 

But speed is exactly why people are betting AI will transform biology. The new methods already claimed a Nobel Prize in 2024 for predicting protein shapes. And investors are staking billions that AI can find new drugs. This week a Boston company, Lila, raised $235 million to build automated labs run by artificial intelligence.

Computer-designed viruses could also find commercial uses. For instance, doctors have sometimes tried “phage therapy” to treat patients with serious bacterial infections. Similar tests are underway to cure cabbage of black rot, also caused by bacteria.

“There is definitely a lot of potential for this technology,” says Samuel King, the student who spearheaded the project in Hei’s lab. He notes that most gene therapy uses viruses to shuttle genes into patients’ bodies, and AI might develop more effective ones.

The Stanford researchers say they purposely haven’t taught their AI about viruses that can infect people. But this type of technology does create the risk that other scientists—out of curiosity, good intentions, or malice—could turn the methods on human pathogens, exploring new dimensions of lethality.

“One area where I urge extreme caution is any viral enhancement research, especially when it’s random so you don’t know what you are getting,” says Venter. “If someone did this with smallpox or anthrax, I would have grave concerns.”

Whether an AI can generate a bona fide genome for a larger organism remains an open question. For instance, E. coli has about a thousand times more DNA code than phiX174 does. “The complexity would rocket from staggering to … way way more than the number of subatomic particles in the universe,” says Boeke.

Also, there’s still no easy way to test AI designs for larger genomes. While some viruses can “boot up” from just a DNA strand, that’s not the case with a bacterium, a mammoth, or a human. Scientists would instead have to gradually change an existing cell with genetic engineering—a still laborious process.

Despite that, Jason Kelly, the CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks, a cell-engineering company in Boston, says exactly such an effort is needed. He believes it could be carried out in “automated” laboratories where genomes get proposed and tested and the results are fed back to AI for further improvement.

 “This would be a nation-scale scientific milestone, as cells are the building blocks of all life,” says Kelly. “The US should make sure we get to it first.”

We can’t “make American children healthy again” without tackling the gun crisis

Note for readers: This newsletter discusses gun violence, a raw and tragic issue in America. It was already in progress on Wednesday when a school shooting occurred at Evergreen High School in Colorado and Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University. 

Earlier this week, the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again movement released a strategy for improving the health and well-being of American children. The report was titled—you guessed it—Make Our Children Healthy Again.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who leads the Department of Health and Human Services, and his colleagues are focusing on four key aspects of child health: diet, exercise, chemical exposure, and overmedicalization.

Anyone who’s been listening to RFK Jr. posturing on health and wellness won’t be surprised by these priorities. And the first two are pretty obvious. On the whole, American children should be eating more healthily. And they should be getting more exercise.

But there’s a glaring omission. The leading cause of death for American children and teenagers isn’t ultraprocessed food or exposure to some chemical. It’s gun violence

Yesterday’s news of yet more high-profile shootings at schools in the US throws this disconnect into even sharper relief. Experts believe it is time to treat gun violence in the US as what it is: a public health crisis.

I live in London, UK, with my husband and two young children. We don’t live in a particularly fancy part of the city—in one recent ranking of London boroughs from most to least posh, ours came in at 30th out of 33. I do worry about crime. But I don’t worry about gun violence.

That changed when I temporarily moved my family to the US a couple of years ago. We rented the ground-floor apartment of a lovely home in Cambridge, Massachusetts—a beautiful area with good schools, pastel-colored houses, and fluffy rabbits hopping about. It wasn’t until after we’d moved in that my landlord told me he had guns in the basement.

My daughter joined the kindergarten of a local school that specialized in music, and we took her younger sister along to watch the kids sing songs about friendship. It was all so heartwarming—until we noticed the school security officer at the entrance carrying a gun.

Later in the year, I received an email alert from the superintendent of the Cambridge Public Schools. “At approximately 1:45 this afternoon, a Cambridge Police Department Youth Officer assigned to Cambridge Rindge and Latin School accidentally discharged their firearm while using a staff bathroom inside the school,” the message began. “The school day was not disrupted.”

These experiences, among others, truly brought home to me the cultural differences over firearms between the US and the UK (along with most other countries). For the first time, I worried about my children’s exposure to them. I banned my children from accessing parts of the house. I felt guilty that my four-year-old had to learn what to do if a gunman entered her school. 

But it’s the statistics that are the most upsetting.

In 2023, 46,728 people died from gun violence in the US, according to a report published in June by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That includes both homicides and suicides, and it breaks down to 128 deaths per day, on average. The majority of those who die from gun violence are adults. But the figures for children are sickening, too. In 2023, 2,566 young people died from gun violence. Of those, 234 were under the age of 10.

Gun death rates among children have more than doubled since 2013. Firearms are involved in more child deaths than cancer or car crashes.

Many other children survive gun violence with nonfatal—but often life-changing—injuries. And the impacts are felt beyond those who are physically injured. Witnessing gun violence or hearing gunshots can understandably cause fear, sadness, and distress.  

That’s worth bearing in mind when you consider that there have been 434 school shootings in the US since Columbine in 1999. The Washington Post estimates that 397,000 students have experienced gun violence at school in that period. Another school shooting took place at Evergreen High School in Colorado on Wednesday, adding to that total.

“Being indirectly exposed to gun violence takes its toll on our mental health and children’s ability to learn,” says Daniel Webster, Bloomberg Professor of American Health at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions in Baltimore.

The MAHA report states that “American youth face a mental health crisis,” going on to note that “suicide deaths among 10- to 24-year-olds increased by 62% from 2007 to 2021” and that “suicide is now the leading cause of death in teens aged 15-19.” What it doesn’t say is that around half of these suicides involve guns.

“When you add all these dimensions, [gun violence is] a very huge public health problem,” says Webster.

Researchers who study gun violence have been saying the same thing for years. And in 2024, then US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared it a public health crisis. “We don’t have to subject our children to the ongoing horror of firearm violence in America,” Murthy said in a statement at the time. Instead, he argued, we should tackle the problem using a public health approach.

Part of that approach involves identifying who is at the greatest risk and offering support to lower that risk, says Webster. Young men who live in poor communities tend to have the highest risk of gun violence, he says, as do those who experience crisis or turmoil. Trying to mediate conflicts or limit access to firearms, even temporarily, can help lower the incidence of gun violence, he says.

There’s an element of social contagion, too, adds Webster. Shooting begets more shooting. He likens it to the outbreak of an infectious disease. “When more people get vaccinated … infection rates go down,” he says. “Almost exactly the same thing happens with gun violence.”

But existing efforts are already under threat. The Trump administration has eliminated hundreds of millions of dollars in grants for organizations working to reduce gun violence.

Webster thinks the MAHA report has “missed the mark” when it comes to the health and well-being of children in the US. “This document is almost the polar opposite to how many people in public health think,” he says. “We have to acknowledge that injuries and deaths from firearms are a big threat to the health and safety of children and adolescents.”

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

2025 Innovator of the Year: Sneha Goenka for developing an ultra-fast sequencing technology

Sneha Goenka is one of MIT Technology Review’s 2025 Innovators Under 35. Meet the rest of this year’s honorees. 

Up to a quarter of children entering intensive care have undiagnosed genetic conditions. To be treated properly, they must first get diagnoses—which means having their genomes sequenced. This process typically takes up to seven weeks. Sadly, that’s often too slow to save a critically ill child.

Hospitals may soon have a faster option, thanks to a groundbreaking system built in part by Sneha Goenka, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton—and MIT Technology Review’s 2025 Innovator of the Year. 

Five years ago, Goenka and her colleagues designed a rapid-sequencing pipeline that can provide a genetic diagnosis in less than eight hours. Goenka’s software computations and hardware architectures were critical to speeding up each stage of the process. 

“Her work made everyone realize that genome sequencing is not only for research and medical application in the future but can have immediate impact on patient care,” says Jeroen de Ridder, a professor at UMC Utrecht in the Netherlands, who has developed an ultrafast sequencing tool for cancer diagnosis. 

Now, as cofounder and scientific lead of a new company, she is working to make that technology widely available to patients around the world.

Goenka grew up in Mumbai, India. Her mother was an advocate for women’s education, but as a child, Goenka had to fight to persuade other family members to let her continue her studies. She moved away from home at 15 to attend her final two years of school and enroll in a premier test-­preparation academy in Kota, Rajasthan. Thanks to that education, she passed what she describes as “one of the most competitive exams in the world,” to get into the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. 

Once admitted to a combined bachelor’s and master’s program in electrical engineering, she found that “it was a real boys’ club.” But Goenka excelled in developing computer architecture systems that accelerate computation. As an undergraduate, she began applying those skills to medicine, driven by her desire to “have real-world impact”—in part because she had seen her family struggle with painful uncertainty after her brother was born prematurely when she was eight years old. 

While working on a PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford, she turned her focus to evolutionary and clinical genomics. One day a senior colleague, Euan Ashley, presented her with a problem. He said, “We want to see how fast we can make a genetic diagnosis. If you had unlimited funds and resources, just how fast do you think you could make the compute?”

Streaming DNA

A genetic diagnosis starts with a blood sample, which is prepped to extract the DNA—a process that takes about three hours. Next that DNA needs to be “read.” One of the world’s leading long-read sequencing technologies, developed by Oxford Nanopore Technologies, can generate highly detailed raw data of an individual’s genetic code in about an hour and a half. Unfortunately, processing all this data to identify mutations can take another 21 hours. Shipping samples to a central lab and figuring out which mutations are of interest often leads the process to stretch out to weeks. 

Goenka saw a better way: Build a real-time system that could “stream” the sequencing data, analyzing it as it was being generated, like streaming a film on Netflix rather than downloading it to watch later.

Sneha Goenka

To do this, she designed a cloud computing architecture to pull in more processing power. Goenka’s first challenge was to increase the speed at which her team could upload the raw data for processing, by streamlining the requests between the sequencer and the cloud to avoid unnecessary “chatter.” She worked out the exact number of communication channels needed—and created algorithms that allowed those channels to be reused in the most efficient way.

The next challenge was “base calling”—converting the raw signal from the sequencing machine into the nucleotide bases A, C, T, and G, the language that makes up our DNA. Rather than using a central node to orchestrate this process, which is an inefficient, error-prone approach, Goenka wrote software to automatically assign dozens of data streams directly from the sequencer to dedicated nodes in the cloud.

Meet the rest of this year’s 
Innovators Under 35.

Then, to identify mutations, the sequences were aligned for comparison with a reference genome. She coded a custom program that triggers alignment as soon as base calling finishes for one batch of sequences while simultaneously initiating base calling for the next batch, thus ensuring that the system’s computational resources are used efficiently.

Add all these im­­prove­­ments together, and Goenka’s approach reduced the total time required to analyze a genome for mutations from around 20 hours to 1.5 hours. Finally, the team worked with genetic counselors and physicians to create a filter that identified which mutations were most critical to a person’s health, and that set was then given a final manual curation by a genetic specialist. These final stages take up to three hours. The technology was close to being fully operational when, suddenly, the first patient arrived. 

A critical test

When 13-year-old Matthew was flown to Stanford’s children’s hospital in 2021, he was struggling to breathe and his heart was failing. Doctors needed to know whether the inflammation in his heart was due to a virus or to a genetic mutation that would necessitate a transplant.  

His blood was drawn on a Thursday. The transplant committee made its decisions on Fridays. “It meant we had a small window of time,” says Goenka.

Goenka was in Mumbai when the sequencing began. She stayed up all night, monitoring the computations. That was when the project stopped being about getting faster for the sake of it, she says: “It became about ‘How fast can we get this result to save this person’s life?’”

The results revealed a genetic mutation that explained Matthew’s condition, and he was placed on the transplant list the next day. Three weeks later, he received a new heart. “He’s doing great now,” Goenka says.

So far, Goenka’s technology has been tested on 26 patients, including Matthew. Her pipeline is “directly affecting the medical care of newborns in the Stanford intensive care units,” Ashley says.

Now she’s aiming for even broader impact—Goenka and her colleagues are laying the groundwork for a startup that they hope will bring the technology to market and make sure it reaches as many patients as possible. Meanwhile, she has been refining the computational pipeline, reducing the time to diagnosis to about six hours.

The demand is clear, she says: “In an in-depth study involving more than a dozen laboratory directors and neonatologists, every respondent stressed urgency. One director put it succinctly: ‘I need this platform today—preferably yesterday.’”

Goenka is also developing software to make the technology more inclusive. The reference genome is skewed toward people of European descent. The Human Pangenome Project is an international collaboration to create reference genomes from more diverse populations, which Goenka aims to use to personalize her team’s filters, allowing them to flag mutations that may be more prevalent in the population to which a patient belongs.

Since seeing her work, Goenka’s extended family has become more appreciative of her education and career. “The entire family is very proud about the impact I’ve made,” she says. 

Helen Thomson is a freelance science journalist based in London.

Putin says organ transplants could grant immortality. Not quite.

This week I’m writing from Manchester, where I’ve been attending a conference on aging. Wednesday was full of talks and presentations by scientists who are trying to understand the nitty-gritty of aging—all the way down to the molecular level. Once we can understand the complex biology of aging, we should be able to slow or prevent the onset of age-related diseases, they hope.

Then my editor forwarded me a video of the leaders of Russia and China talking about immortality. “These days at 70 years old you are still a child,” China’s Xi Jinping, 72, was translated as saying, according to footage livestreamed by CCTV to multiple media outlets.

“With the developments of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality,” Russia’s Vladimir Putin, also 72, is reported to have replied.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un walk side by side

SERGEI BOBYLEV, SPUTNIK, KREMLIN POOL PHOTO VIA AP

There’s a striking contrast between that radical vision and the incremental longevity science presented at the meeting. Repeated rounds of organ transplantation surgery aren’t likely to help anyone radically extend their lifespan anytime soon.

First, back to Putin’s proposal: the idea of continually replacing aged organs to stay young. It’s a simplistic way to think about aging. After all, aging is so complicated that researchers can’t agree on what causes it, why it occurs, or even how to define it, let alone “treat” it.

Having said that, there may be some merit to the idea of repairing worn-out body parts with biological or synthetic replacements. Replacement therapies—including bioengineered organs—are being developed by multiple research teams. Some have already been tested in people. This week, let’s take a look at the idea of replacement therapies.

No one fully understands why our organs start to fail with age. On the face of it, replacing them seems like a good idea. After all, we already know how to do organ transplants. They’ve been a part of medicine since the 1950s and have been used to save hundreds of thousands of lives in the US alone.

And replacing old organs with young ones might have more broadly beneficial effects. When a young mouse is stitched to an old one, the older mouse benefits from the arrangement, and its health seems to improve.

The problem is that we don’t really know why. We don’t know what it is about young body tissues that makes them health-promoting. We don’t know how long these effects might last in a person. We don’t know how different organ transplants will compare, either. Might a young heart be more beneficial than a young liver? No one knows.

And that’s before you consider the practicalities of organ transplantation. There is already a shortage of donor organs—thousands of people die on waiting lists. Transplantation requires major surgery and, typically, a lifetime of prescription drugs that damp down the immune system, leaving a person more susceptible to certain infections and diseases.

So the idea of repeated organ transplantations shouldn’t really be a particularly appealing one. “I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon,” says Jesse Poganik, who studies aging at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and is also in Manchester for the meeting.

Poganik has been collaborating with transplant surgeons in his own research. “The surgeries are good, but they’re not simple,” he tells me. And they come with real risks. His own 24-year-old cousin developed a form of cancer after a liver and heart transplant. She died a few weeks ago, he says.

So when it comes to replacing worn-out organs, scientists are looking for both biological and synthetic alternatives.  

We’ve been replacing body parts for centuries. Wooden toes were used as far back as the 15th century. Joint replacements have been around for more than a hundred years. And major innovations over the last 70 years have given us devices like pacemakers, hearing aids, brain implants, and artificial hearts.

Scientists are exploring other ways to make tissues and organs, too. There are different approaches here, but they include everything from injecting stem cells to seeding “scaffolds” with cells in a lab.

In 1999, researchers used volunteers’ own cells to seed bladder-shaped collagen scaffolds. The resulting bioengineered bladders went on to be transplanted into seven people in an initial trial

Now scientists are working on more complicated organs. Jean Hébert, a program manager at the US government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, has been exploring ways to gradually replace the cells in a person’s brain. The idea is that, eventually, the recipient will end up with a young brain.

Hébert showed my colleague Antonio Regalado how, in his early experiments, he removed parts of mice’s brains and replaced them with embryonic stem cells. That work seems a world away from the biochemical studies being presented at the British Society for Research on Ageing annual meeting in Manchester, where I am now.

On Wednesday, one scientist described how he’d been testing potential longevity drugs on the tiny nematode worm C. elegans. These worms live for only about 15 to 40 days, and his team can perform tens of thousands of experiments with them. About 40% of the drugs that extend lifespan in C. elegans also help mice live longer, he told us.

To me, that’s not an amazing hit rate. And we don’t know how many of those drugs will work in people. Probably less than 40% of that 40%.

Other scientists presented work on chemical reactions happening at the cellular level. It was deep, basic science, and my takeaway was that there’s a lot aging researchers still don’t fully understand.

It will take years—if not decades—to get the full picture of aging at the molecular level. And if we rely on a series of experiments in worms, and then mice, and then humans, we’re unlikely to make progress for a really long time. In that context, the idea of replacement therapy feels like a shortcut.

“Replacement is a really exciting avenue because you don’t have to understand the biology of aging as much,” says Sierra Lore, who studies aging at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California.

Lore says she started her research career studying aging at the molecular level, but she soon changed course. She now plans to focus her attention on replacement therapies. “I very quickly realized we’re decades away [from understanding the molecular processes that underlie aging],” she says. “Why don’t we just take what we already know—replacement—and try to understand and apply it better?”

So perhaps Putin’s straightforward approach to delaying aging holds some merit. Whether it will grant him immortality is another matter.

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

RFK Jr’s plan to improve America’s diet is missing the point

A lot of Americans don’t eat well. And they’re paying for it with their health. A diet high in sugar, sodium, and saturated fat can increase the risk of problems like diabetes, heart disease, and kidney disease, to name a few. And those are among the leading causes of death in the US.

This is hardly news. But this week Robert F Kennedy Jr., who heads the US Department of Health and Human Services, floated a new solution to the problem. Kennedy and education secretary Linda McMahon think that teaching medical students more about the role of nutrition in health could help turn things around.

“I’m working with Linda on forcing medical schools … to put nutrition into medical school education,” Kennedy said during a cabinet meeting on August 26. The next day, HHS released a statement calling for “increased nutrition education” for medical students.

“We can reverse the chronic-disease epidemic simply by changing our diets and lifestyles,” Kennedy said in an accompanying video statement. “But to do that, we need nutrition to be a basic part of every doctor’s training.”

It certainly sounds like a good idea. If more Americans ate a healthier diet, we could expect to see a decrease in those diseases. But this framing of America’s health crisis is overly simplistic, especially given that plenty of the administration’s other actions have directly undermined health in multiple ways—including by canceling a vital nutrition education program.

At any rate, there are other, more effective ways to tackle the chronic-disease crisis.

The biggest killers, heart disease and stroke, are responsible for more than a third of deaths, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A healthy diet can reduce your risk of developing those conditions. And it makes total sense to educate the future doctors of America about nutrition.

Medical bodies are on board with the idea, too. “The importance of nutrition in medical education is increasingly clear, and we support expanded, evidence-based instruction to better equip physicians to prevent and manage chronic disease and improve patient outcomes,” David H. Aizuss, chair of the American Medical Association’s board of trustees, said in a statement.

But it’s not as though medical students aren’t getting any nutrition education. And that training has increased in the last five years, according to surveys carried out by the American Association of Medical Colleges.

Kennedy has referred to a 2021 survey suggesting that medical students in the US get only around one hour of nutrition education per year. But the AAMC argues that nutrition education increasingly happens through “integrated experiences” rather than stand-alone lectures.

“Medical schools understand the critical role that nutrition plays in preventing, managing, and treating chronic health conditions, and incorporate significant nutrition education across their required curricula,” Alison J. Whelan, AAMC’s chief academic officer, said in a statement.

That’s not to say there isn’t room for improvement. Gabby Headrick, a food systems dietician and associate director of food and nutrition policy at George Washington University’s Institute for Food Safety & Nutrition Security, thinks nutritionists could take a more prominent role in patient care, too.

But it’s somewhat galling for the administration to choose medical education as its focus given the recent cuts in federal funding that will affect health. For example, funding for the National Diabetes Prevention Program, which offers support and guidance to help thousands of people adopt healthy diets and exercise routines, was canceled by the Trump administration in March.

The focus on medical schools also overlooks one of the biggest factors behind poor nutrition in the US: access to healthy food. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that increased costs make it harder for most Americans to eat well. Twenty percent of the people surveyed acknowledged that their diets were not healthy.

“So many people know what a healthy diet is, and they know what should be on their plate every night,” says Headrick, who has researched this issue. “But the vast majority of folks just truly do not have the money or the time to get the food on the plate.”

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has been helping low-income Americans afford some of those healthier foods. It supported over 41 million people in 2024. But under the Trump administration’s tax and spending bill, the program is set to lose around $186 billion in funding over the next 10 years.

Kennedy’s focus is on education. And it just so happens that there is a nutrition education program in place—one that helps people of all ages learn not only what healthy foods are, but how to source them on a budget and use them to prepare meals.

SNAP-Ed, as it’s known, has already provided this support to millions of Americans. Under the Trump administration, it is set to be eliminated.

It is difficult to see how these actions are going to help people adopt healthier diets. What might be a better approach? I put the question to Headrick: If she were in charge, what policies would she enact?

“Universal health care,” she told me. Being able to access health care without risking financial hardship not only improves health outcomes and life expectancy; it also spares people from medical debt—something that affects around 40% of adults in the US, according to a recent survey.

And the Trump administration’s plans to cut federal health spending by about a trillion dollars over the next decade certainly aren’t going to help with that. All told, around 16 million people could lose their health insurance by 2034, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office.

“The evidence suggests that if we cut folks’ social benefit programs, such as access to health care and food, we are going to see detrimental impacts,” says Headrick. “And it’s going to cause an increased burden of preventable disease.”

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

RFK Jr’s plan to improve America’s diet is missing the point

A lot of Americans don’t eat well. And they’re paying for it with their health. A diet high in sugar, sodium, and saturated fat can increase the risk of problems like diabetes, heart disease, and kidney disease, to name a few. And those are among the leading causes of death in the US.

This is hardly news. But this week Robert F Kennedy Jr., who heads the US Department of Health and Human Services, floated a new solution to the problem. Kennedy and education secretary Linda McMahon think that teaching medical students more about the role of nutrition in health could help turn things around.

“I’m working with Linda on forcing medical schools … to put nutrition into medical school education,” Kennedy said during a cabinet meeting on August 26. The next day, HHS released a statement calling for “increased nutrition education” for medical students.

“We can reverse the chronic-disease epidemic simply by changing our diets and lifestyles,” Kennedy said in an accompanying video statement. “But to do that, we need nutrition to be a basic part of every doctor’s training.”

It certainly sounds like a good idea. If more Americans ate a healthier diet, we could expect to see a decrease in those diseases. But this framing of America’s health crisis is overly simplistic, especially given that plenty of the administration’s other actions have directly undermined health in multiple ways—including by canceling a vital nutrition education program.

At any rate, there are other, more effective ways to tackle the chronic-disease crisis.

The biggest killers, heart disease and stroke, are responsible for more than a third of deaths, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A healthy diet can reduce your risk of developing those conditions. And it makes total sense to educate the future doctors of America about nutrition.

Medical bodies are on board with the idea, too. “The importance of nutrition in medical education is increasingly clear, and we support expanded, evidence-based instruction to better equip physicians to prevent and manage chronic disease and improve patient outcomes,” David H. Aizuss, chair of the American Medical Association’s board of trustees, said in a statement.

But it’s not as though medical students aren’t getting any nutrition education. And that training has increased in the last five years, according to surveys carried out by the American Association of Medical Colleges.

Kennedy has referred to a 2021 survey suggesting that medical students in the US get only around one hour of nutrition education per year. But the AAMC argues that nutrition education increasingly happens through “integrated experiences” rather than stand-alone lectures.

“Medical schools understand the critical role that nutrition plays in preventing, managing, and treating chronic health conditions, and incorporate significant nutrition education across their required curricula,” Alison J. Whelan, AAMC’s chief academic officer, said in a statement.

That’s not to say there isn’t room for improvement. Gabby Headrick, a food systems dietician and associate director of food and nutrition policy at George Washington University’s Institute for Food Safety & Nutrition Security, thinks nutritionists could take a more prominent role in patient care, too.

But it’s somewhat galling for the administration to choose medical education as its focus given the recent cuts in federal funding that will affect health. For example, funding for the National Diabetes Prevention Program, which offers support and guidance to help thousands of people adopt healthy diets and exercise routines, was canceled by the Trump administration in March.

The focus on medical schools also overlooks one of the biggest factors behind poor nutrition in the US: access to healthy food. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that increased costs make it harder for most Americans to eat well. Twenty percent of the people surveyed acknowledged that their diets were not healthy.

“So many people know what a healthy diet is, and they know what should be on their plate every night,” says Headrick, who has researched this issue. “But the vast majority of folks just truly do not have the money or the time to get the food on the plate.”

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has been helping low-income Americans afford some of those healthier foods. It supported over 41 million people in 2024. But under the Trump administration’s tax and spending bill, the program is set to lose around $186 billion in funding over the next 10 years.

Kennedy’s focus is on education. And it just so happens that there is a nutrition education program in place—one that helps people of all ages learn not only what healthy foods are, but how to source them on a budget and use them to prepare meals.

SNAP-Ed, as it’s known, has already provided this support to millions of Americans. Under the Trump administration, it is set to be eliminated.

It is difficult to see how these actions are going to help people adopt healthier diets. What might be a better approach? I put the question to Headrick: If she were in charge, what policies would she enact?

“Universal health care,” she told me. Being able to access health care without risking financial hardship not only improves health outcomes and life expectancy; it also spares people from medical debt—something that affects around 40% of adults in the US, according to a recent survey.

And the Trump administration’s plans to cut federal health spending by about a trillion dollars over the next decade certainly aren’t going to help with that. All told, around 16 million people could lose their health insurance by 2034, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office.

“The evidence suggests that if we cut folks’ social benefit programs, such as access to health care and food, we are going to see detrimental impacts,” says Headrick. “And it’s going to cause an increased burden of preventable disease.”

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

I gave the police access to my DNA—and maybe some of yours

Last year, I added my DNA profile to a private genealogical database, FamilyTreeDNA, and clicked “Yes” to allow the police to search my genes.

In 2018, police in California announced they’d caught the Golden State Killer, a man who had eluded capture for decades. They did it by uploading crime-scene DNA to websites like the one I’d joined, where genealogy hobbyists share genetic profiles to find relatives and explore ancestry. Once the police had “matches” to a few relatives of the killer, they built a large family tree from which they plucked the likely suspect.

This process, called forensic investigative genetic genealogy, or FIGG, has since helped solve hundreds of murders and sexual assaults. Still, while the technology is potent, it’s incompletely realized. It operates via a mishmash of private labs and unregulated websites, like FamilyTree, which give users a choice to opt into or out of police searches. The number of profiles available for search by police hovers around 1.5 million, not yet enough to find matches in all cases.

To do my bit to increase those numbers, I traveled to Springfield, Massachusetts.

The staff of the local district attorney, Anthony D. Gulluni, was giving away free FamilyTree tests at a minor-league hockey game in an effort to widen its DNA net and help solve several cold-case murders. After glancing over a consent form, I spit into a tube and handed it back. According to the promotional material from Gulluni’s office, I’d “become a hero.”

But I wasn’t really driven by some urge to capture distantly related serial killers. Rather, my spit had a less gallant and more quarrelsome motive: to troll privacy advocates whose fears around DNA I think are overblown and unhelpful. By giving up my saliva for inspection, I was going against the view that a person’s DNA is the individualized, sacred text that privacy advocates sometimes claim.

Indeed, the only reason FIGG works is that relatives share DNA: You share about 50% with a parent, 25% with a grandparent, about 12.5% with a first cousin, and so on. When I got my FamilyTree report back, my DNA had “matched” with 3,309 people.

Some people are frightened by FIGG or reject its punitive aims. One European genealogist I know says her DNA is kept private because she opposes the death penalty and doesn’t want to risk aiding US authorities in cases where lethal injection might be applied. But if enough people share their DNA, conscientious objectors won’t matter. Scientists estimate that a database including 2% of the US population, or 6 million people, could identify the source of nearly any crime-scene DNA, given how many distant relatives each of us has.

Scholars of big data have termed this phenomenon “tyranny of the minority.” One person’s voluntary disclosure can end up exposing the same information about many others. And that tyranny can be abused.

DNA information held in private genealogy websites like FamilyTree is lightly guarded by terms of service. These agreements have flip-flopped over time; at one point all users were included in law enforcement searches by default. Rules are easily ignored, too. Recent court filings indicate that the FBI, in its zeal to solve crimes, sometimes barges past restrictions to look for matches in databases whose policies exclude police.

“Noble aims; no rules” is how one genetic genealogist described the overall situation in her field.

My uncertainty grew the more questions I asked. Who even controls my DNA file? That’s not easy to find out. FamilyTree is a brand operated by another company, Gene by Gene, which in 2021 was sold to a third company, MyDNA—ultimately owned by an Australian mogul whose name appears nowhere on its website. When I reached FamilyTree’s general manager, the genealogist Dave Vance, he told me that three-quarters of the profiles on the site were “opted in” to law enforcement searches.

One solution holds that the federal government should organize its own national DNA database for FIGG. But that would require new laws, new technical standards, and a debate about how our society wants to employ this type of big data—not just getting individual consent like mine. No such national project—or consensus—exists.

I’m still ready to join a national crime-fighting database, but I regret doing it the way I did—spitting in a tube on the sidelines of a hockey game and signing a consent form that affects not just me but all my thousands of genetic relatives. To them, I say: Whoops. Your DNA; my bad.

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.