Claude just found a molecular machine nobody knew existed, reading the literature and genome data, then proposing the experiments that confirmed it. AI went from struggling with high school math to cracking open problems in a few years, and biology is on that same curve. The exciting part isn't what AI builds from known science — it's the biology nobody knew to look for.
Spotting an odd gene cluster next to a repeat array is the easy part, and genome-neighborhood mining has been doing it for decades with mature, published pipelines. The hard work is proving what a system actually does, and there's no evidence yet of any programmable properties that would justify the CRISPR comparison. Hyping incremental findings as a major discovery cheapens the real breakthrough when it finally arrives.
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