AI won’t replace biologists — it’ll just join the staff

Jennifer Doudna, Nobel Prize winner, biochemist, and CRISPR co-inventor, breaks down how AI is already reshaping experimental biology: speeding up mundane tasks like data cleanup and formatting, and increasingly helping spot patterns in large datasets that would be nearly impossible to catch by hand. But Doudna draws a clear line — AI agents can execute a protocol, not design one, and they still can’t make the on-the-fly judgment calls a researcher makes in the lab every day. Her take on the future isn’t scientists replaced by robots, but scientists working alongside AI coworkers who handle the grunt work, freeing humans to ask the harder questions.

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