The Siri of the cell – tech podcast
How Alexa-style language processing is allowing scientists to talk to the cells of our bodies
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How can scientists deal with the huge volume of new research publish on a daily basis? How can computers go further than merely parsing scientific papers, and actually suggest hypotheses themselves? When will we see a computer as another member of the lab team, serving hundreds of scientists simultaneously from its huge data set of extant research?
This is the work of John Bachman, a systems biology PhD from Harvard Medical School, and Benjamin M. Gyori, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School’s systems pharmacology lab. They’re part of Darpa’s Big Mechanism project, which is developing technology to read research abstracts and papers to extract pieces of causal mechanisms, then to assemble these pieces into more complete causal models, and to produce explanations. The domain of the program is cancer biology with an emphasis on signaling pathways.
The ‘Siri of the cell’ concept is a central theme of a 2014 essay by Anne-Ruxandra Carvunis and Trey Ideker for the journal Cell.
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