Cancer Has a New Enemy: A.I.

Three years ago, Jinghui Zhang, chair of the department of computational biology at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, tried to download a set of 1,547 samples from a government database so she could run an experiment on it. The download took a year and a half. Every time Zhang's team thought they had the complete set of data, they performed a statistical check that was supposed to catch any transmission errors. Seven times, the check failed. Seven times, the team started working only to realize that part of the set was missing, and they'd have to start all over.