A proposal outlines five grand challenges for biology, including synthesizing life from chemical precursors in the lab, cryopreserving and recovering whole mice, creating an enzyme to reverse-translate peptides into nucleic acids, engineering Rubisco with improved specificity and turnover, and developing a living cell with a four-base codon system.
Anthropic has established a wet lab in the San Francisco Bay Area to advance its AI drug discovery program, moving beyond computer-based research into physical biology experiments. The startup aims to develop treatments for rare diseases neglected by pharmaceutical companies, with CEO Dario Amodei personally motivated by his father's death from disease. Anthropic plans to use AI to automate lab work through robotic units while maintaining human oversight for safety.
Ben Lamm, founder of de-extinction biotech firm Colossal Biosciences, debuted on the 2026 Forbes 400 at No. 302 with a $5.7 billion fortune, becoming one of 34 newcomers. Texas dominates the list with billionaires like Elon Musk ($908 billion) and Michael Dell ($263 billion), while the entry threshold surged to a record $4.4 billion, excluding nearly 600 American billionaires from the ranking.
A self-replicating carbon-based machine escaped from a laboratory and evolved into an unstoppable organism that learned to fix carbon from the air, spread through the oceans, and eventually destroyed all life on Earth by cleaving siloxane bonds and converting the planet to silicon dioxide.