My message to America’s top scientists

People often ask me which technologies have the most potential to change our lives in the decades ahead.

AI is always near the top of the list. Gene-based tools are another technology that I always mention. For example, advances in that field are giving researchers powerful new tools to investigate potential cures for AIDS, sickle-cell disease, and other conditions.

**The Diseases of Poverty and The Potential of AI and Gene Therapy **

The core of our foundation work focus on eliminating the gross inequities in health that we had seen a few years earlier on our first trip to Africa.

Today, I want to talk about several exciting and important tools of modern science that have the potential to help us solve some of the biggest health problems—not only in low- and middle-income countries, but everywhere.

Today, we have an opportunity with the evolution of tools like AI and gene-based technologies to develop a new generation of health solutions that can benefit everyone, everywhere.

Since Alan Turing laid the groundwork for artificial intelligence in 1950, AI has gone through a kind of boom-and-bust (繁荣和萧条) cycle—enthusiasm would grow and then expectations weren’t met.

But we are finally beginning to realize the potential of AI. The computational power available for AI applications is doubling every three and half months—far surpassing the historical metric of Moore’s Law. This processing capability is being coupled with troves of new data, and we are learning to annotate this data in smarter ways. That’s enabling us to realize some of the promises of AI: the ability to synthesize, analyze, see patterns, gain insights, and make predictions across many, many more dimensions than a human can comprehend.

This data revolution will apply to virtually all of the disciplines represented here today. What I’m most excited about is how it can help us make sense of complex biological systems and accelerate the discovery of therapeutics to improve health in the poorest countries.

And, with recent breakthroughs in gene-editing technologies like CRISPR, we are on the verge of a new era of precision diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines that has the potential to improve health—not only for rare genetic disorders, but also for diseases that predominately afflict people in poor countries.

It’s amazing to think how far we’ve come since Crick, Watson, and Franklin laid the foundation for modern genetics. It was only 15 years ago that the Human Genome Project gave us the ability to read our DNA and identify specific sequences that cause or contribute to disease. It was only 8 years ago that CRISPR gave us the ability to edit DNA precisely.

Now, with the latest CRISPR gene-editing approaches, it’s believed that up to 89% of genetic variants known to be associated with human disease can be corrected.

Last year, researchers began using the molecular scissors of CRISPR in clinical trials to remove, edit, and inject people’s cells back into their bodies.

In short, artificial intelligence and CRISPR have emerged as powerful tools with the potential to revolutionize healthcare and many other fields.

See you tomorrow