NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 09: A working Enigma cipher machine that along with the 1942 56-page notebook ... [ ] belonging to codebreaker Alan Turing is to be auctioned Bonham's auction house on April 9, 2015 in New York City. The notebook is to be auctioned in New York on Monday. The notebook alone is expected to go for $1 million. Turing's life and work were recently brought to life in the 2014 blockbuster "The Imitation Game", which drew eight Oscar nominations. The Swiss government's Spiez Laboratory, one of whose specialisations is the study of deadly toxins and infectious diseases, is located right in the heart of Switzerland, incidentally not too far away from the Reichenbach Falls, where Sherlock Holmes vanquished Professor Moriarty (more about him later) in'The Final Problem'.

We often hear about the benefits artificial intelligence (AI) can bring to medicine and healthcare through drug research, but could it also pose a threat? Researchers from Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, a North Carolina-based drug discovery company, have published a paper that highlights the dangerous potential of AI and machine learning to discover biochemical weapons. By simply tweaking a machine learning model called MegaSyn to reward instead of penalise predicted toxicity, their AI was able to generate 40,000 biochemical weapons in six hours. Worryingly, the researchers admitted to never having considered the risks of misuse involved in designing molecules. "The thought had never previously struck us. We were vaguely aware of security concerns around work with pathogens or toxic chemicals, but that did not relate to us; we primarily operate in a virtual setting. Our work is rooted in building machine learning models for therapeutic and toxic targets to better assist in the design of new molecules for drug discovery. We have spent decades using computers and AI to improve human health--not to degrade it," the paper noted.

In September 2021, scientists Sean Ekins and Fabio Urbina were working on an experiment they had named the "Dr. The Swiss government's Spiez laboratory had asked them to find out what would happen if their AI drug discovery platform, MegaSyn, fell into the wrong hands. In much the way undergraduate chemistry students play with ball-and-stick model sets to learn how different chemical elements interact to form molecular compounds, Ekins and his team at Collaborations Pharmaceuticals used publicly available databases containing the molecular structures and bioactivity data of millions of molecules to teach MegaSyn how to generate new compounds with pharmaceutical potential. The plan was to use it to accelerate the drug discovery process for rare and neglected diseases. The best drugs are ones with high specificity--acting only on desired or targeted cells or neuroreceptors, for instance--and low toxicity to reduce ill effects.