FFP EP. 10 | AI Supercharges CRISPR & LIGO (Nobel Prize Week Preview)

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

• Stanford Medicine — AI + CRISPR Breakthrough
• Nature Biomedical Engineering — AI-CRISPR Original Paper
• Caltech — AI Helps LIGO
• Science — LIGO Machine Learning Paper