DeepMind VP Says AI Is Democratising Science and Could Crack the Human Genome

AI as the Great Scientific Equaliser

Google DeepMind's Vice President of Research, Pushmeet Kohli, has outlined a bold vision for artificial intelligence as the most powerful tool for democratising scientific discovery. In a wide-ranging interview, Kohli argued that AI is dismantling the traditional barriers of cost, time, and institutional access that have long kept cutting-edge research confined to a handful of wealthy laboratories.

At the centre of his argument is AlphaFold, the Nobel Prize-winning protein structure prediction model developed by DeepMind. What once required millions of dollars and years of laboratory work can now be accomplished with a single click. The model has been used by more than three million researchers across over one hundred and eighty countries and has been cited in over forty thousand academic papers.

Cracking the Recipe Book of Life

Kohli identified the human genome as the next frontier for AI in biology. While scientists can now read DNA sequences, understanding the full implications of those sequences remains one of the biggest unsolved puzzles in science. Ninety-eight percent of human DNA is noncoding, meaning it does not directly produce proteins but instead orchestrates how genetic instructions are carried out inside cells.

In January, DeepMind published AlphaGenome in Nature, an AI model capable of analysing up to one million DNA base pairs at a time and predicting how mutations in noncoding regions affect gene expression. Nearly three thousand scientists from one hundred and sixty countries are already using it to advance research into cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, and infectious diseases. DeepMind has also made the model's source code and weights freely available for noncommercial research.

India's Moment in the AI Spotlight

Kohli made the case that India is uniquely positioned to conduct world-class AI research without its brightest minds needing to leave the country. DeepMind's Bengaluru laboratory is already contributing to Gemini, the company's foundational AI model, while simultaneously developing India-specific applications in agriculture and language technology.

The timing is significant. India is hosting the AI Impact Summit from the sixteenth to the twentieth of February in New Delhi, the first major global AI summit to be held in the Global South. The event has attracted heads of government from over fifteen countries, more than fifty international ministers, and chief executives from companies including Google, Nvidia, Meta, and OpenAI.