Can AI Decode Life's Secret Language?

The Mouse Without a Mother

A few weeks ago, in a laboratory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, something happened that redefines the boundaries of life itself. Researchers successfully created a healthy, fertile male mouse using only male DNA. No maternal contribution. No egg. Just two sperm cells and a bold leap into the biological unknown.

This wasn't luck. Using CRISPR-based gene-editing tools, they reprogrammed seven key imprinting regions and implanted over 250 embryos. Only two survived, both male. The first grew normally and even fathered offspring of his own. The second confirmed the breakthrough, following the same successful path.

This is the first time that viable, fertile mammals were created from two male parents without altering their DNA sequence, only by modifying how that DNA was read. This wasn’t just another CRISPR milestone. It was a rewrite of the rules of mammalian reproduction.

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But let's pause here.
If scientists can create a living mouse without maternal DNA, what happens when we inevitably apply these techniques to humans? If we can create life outside the womb, in a dish, from genetic material that nature never intended to combine... is that life still "human"? And if so, what exactly do we mean by "human"?

Is it biological viability, the ability to grow, reproduce, survive? Is it DNA sequence, the specific arrangement of genetic letters that makes us distinct from other species? Or is humanity something deeper: consciousness, the capacity for love, for suffering, for creating meaning?

Perhaps it's social: the ability to form bonds, to communicate, to participate in the complex web of relationships that define human society. Maybe it's spiritual: some ineffable essence, a soul, that transcends mere biology. Or could it be ethical: the inherent dignity and rights we grant to beings we recognize as "one of us.”

These questions aren't abstract philosophy; they’re becoming urgent practical concerns. If we can engineer the biological conditions for life, if we can create beings from male DNA alone, if we can grow them in artificial wombs... at what point do we cross the line from creating life to creating something else entirely?

The boundaries are blurring, and fast.

From Science Fiction to Scientific Reality

Eight years ago, during the TED Summit in Banff, I hosted a workshop on ectogenesis. The question I posed was simple yet uncomfortable: "For couples who cannot conceive naturally, how far are we ethically willing to go to create life?"

At the time, ectogenesis, the idea of growing a human outside the womb, felt like fringe science fiction. But in 2017, researchers at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia changed everything. They created an artificial womb and placed premature lamb fetuses inside. The results were stunning: the lambs didn't just survive, they thrived. They grew wool, gained weight, and even opened their eyes. Eight fetuses developed successfully in this revolutionary environment.

And while lambs are not humans, this wasn't science fiction anymore; it was science fact. It marked a crucial transition: from imagining life outside the womb to engineering the conditions for it.

But here's where the story gets deeper. These breakthroughs force us to confront fundamental questions about what constitutes life, personhood, and our ethical boundaries. And as I discovered, these answers aren't universal.

Life's Invisible Software

For decades, we believed DNA was everything. The Human Genome Project promised that once we decoded all 3 billion letters of human genetic code, we'd unlock the secrets of life itself. Disease, behavior, intelligence, personality. It would all be there, written in As, Ts, Gs, and Cs, the four letters of DNA.

Then came the sobering reality. Humans have only about 20,000 genes. A tiny roundworm has nearly the same number. A grape has more. Even more puzzling, humans share 99.9% of their DNA with each other, yet we're remarkably different. And perhaps most humbling of all, humans share about 60% of their genes with bananas; not in identity, but in evolutionary function. It's a reminder that much of life runs on shared biological code, even across species that seem worlds apart.

Enter CRISPR. Short for "Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats," it's a gene-editing tool that bacteria developed millions of years ago as an immune system to fight viruses. Scientists figured out how to repurpose this ancient biological mechanism into the most precise genetic editing tool we've ever had.

CRISPR changed everything again. Suddenly, we could edit genes with unprecedented precision, cutting and pasting genetic code like text in a document. We could remove disease-causing mutations, enhance desired traits, even create entirely new biological functions. The power was intoxicating, the possibilities seemingly endless.

But even as CRISPR gave us the ability to rewrite the genetic code, it also revealed the code's limitations. Editing a gene didn't always produce the expected result. The same genetic change could have wildly different effects in different people, different environments, different contexts.

The Layer Beyond Genes

But what if our understanding has been incomplete? What if DNA is just the hardware, and the real software that brings a being to life is something else entirely?

What if it's the way environment, stress, care, or neglect turn genes on or off? What if it's the invisible system of switches layered on top of the genetic code, influenced by everything from nutrition to emotions, from parental care to exposure to toxins?

Welcome to epigenetics.

Consider two identical twins, born with the same DNA. Over time, they can develop remarkably different traits. One might be prone to anxiety while the other remains calm under pressure. One might develop diabetes while the other doesn't. The trauma experienced by a Holocaust survivor can somehow echo into their grandchildren's biology. These aren't scientific curiosities. They’re proof: life is more complex than any genetic sequence can explain.

This invisible software operates through surprisingly elegant mechanisms:

• DNA methylation: the chemical addition of methyl groups that can silence or activate genes, like dimmer switches controlling which lights turn on in a house

• Histone modification: structural changes to the proteins that wrap around DNA, making certain genetic areas more or less accessible. Imagine reshuffling a library so some books become easier to find while others get buried deeper in the back.

For years, epigenetics lingered on the edge of scientific legitimacy, dismissed first as "pseudoscience," then reluctantly accepted as "soft science." Now it's stepping into the mainstream. It was too ethereal to trust, too invisible to matter. Today, it stands at the threshold of a paradigm shift. With each new study, the invisible becomes legible, and what once sounded like a metaphor begins to reshape medicine, identity, and even morality.

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But if we can manipulate these epigenetic switches, if we can control the very software of life, we're not just doing science anymore. We're making philosophical decisions about what life should become.

Should we modify epigenetic markers to reduce anxiety in future generations? To enhance memory? To make people more resilient to trauma? Each choice isn't just technical; it's a value judgment about what makes a "better" human being.

The Cultural Lens of Life and Ethics

So, who decides what constitutes life?
Philosophy? Science? Politics? Religion? Or is it something deeper, maybe culture itself?

I was in China teaching emerging media when this question hit me with full force. I was completing my doctoral thesis at the time, wrestling with CRISPR and embryonic modification, and I kept bumping up against something that puzzled me: the stark difference between how the Western and Eastern worlds approached working with embryos.

One morning at breakfast, I found myself sitting across from a professor of calligraphy who was also a well-known philosopher. Over tea and congee, I finally asked him directly: "Why is embryo research so different here? In the West, we have this 14-day rule where research on embryos is allowed up to 14 days, then they must be destroyed. It's written into international law, rooted in religious and ethical norms. But here..."

He set down his chopsticks, smiled softly, and answered without hesitation: "Because of Confucius. In Confucian thinking, a seed is not yet a tree. It may become one, but it isn't, yet."

I must have looked puzzled. I was talking about humans, not trees, because he continued, still smiling: "Consider an embryo as that seed. It holds the potential to become a person, but it is not yet a person. The distinction matters."

That simple analogy, “seed versus tree,” revealed something profound that morning. Ethics isn't universal. It's cultural, contextual, interpretive. We were talking about life before life, about potentiality before form. And perhaps this is why it escapes us: human perception is tuned to the visible, the measurable, the born.

What if there was a new eye? Not spiritual. Not human. Just capable of seeing what we cannot yet observe.

A New Eye for the Invisible

And this is where artificial intelligence could enter the story.

Not as a threat, but as a tool. Not to replace life, but to understand it. AI can already identify patterns too subtle for human analysis, predict gene expression based on environmental data, and simulate outcomes of hypothetical biological environments.

Here's my question: if life is more than DNA, if it's shaped by environment, presence, and care, and if AI can perceive, interpret, and even reflect these invisible patterns better and faster than us... can AI help us understand what makes us human without threatening it?

This is not a call for synthetic life. It's a call for humble, radical observation.

The Reciprocal Learning

If AI can perceive epigenetic patterns we cannot see, if it can trace the invisible threads connecting environment to gene expression, then perhaps it can make us aware of how our choices, our cities, our relationships, our stress, our care, are literally rewriting the biological future.

What if it could reveal the hidden consequences of how we live, how we build our world, how we treat each other? What if it could map out, in real time, how a parent's chronic stress is switching genes on and off in their children? How pollution in one neighborhood is altering immune responses that will be passed down? How the design of our schools and workplaces is influencing the genetic expression of resilience or anxiety in the next generation?

What if we could map all of that? Is it taking away our "humanness"?

We stand at a threshold. On one side, our growing ability to manipulate life at the fundamental level. On the other, our limited understanding of what makes life... life. AI might be the key to bridging this gap, not by creating artificial life, but by deciphering the secret language life uses to create itself.

I know this sounds risky, adventurous, maybe even unsettling. But the real question isn’t whether we should fear what’s coming. It’s whether we’re aware that it’s probably already on its way.

I remember standing in that room in Banff, years ago, watching a group of strangers argue over the future of birth, and asking them how far we're willing to go to create life.

Back then, it was just a thought experiment. Today, I’m not so sure. The questions are no longer theoretical.
They’re real.
They’re coming fast.

And we may soon have to decide not just how we create life, but why.