Cease Not till Death

As the CSHL AI4Bio symposium comes to an end, the exuberance recedes and quieter thoughts rise in its place. Looking back on the past few days, it was a real blast, and I am eternally thankful to Carlos, my dear advisor, who sponsored the trip. Still, the dauntingly thick abstract book, the fast-forwarding pace of the field, and today’s session on Bio Agents have left me with more questions than answers.

LLM agents evolve fast—much faster than I can learn. People are designing closed loops that take more and more of the human component out of scientific discovery, and I keep wondering where my place is in that process, as a student who has only just entered the field. I argued the point with Opus 4.8 and, unfortunately, lost. (Could be my inexperience or inability to persuade) Apparently the inevitable day will come sooner or later, and my personal contribution could come to look indistinguishable from noise.

I had to get up and step outside for a fresh breath. Sitting beside the lawn, feeling the mildly stinky breeze, I found myself picking up When Breath Becomes Air—the book we were assigned as freshmen at Vanderbilt, the one I ultimately chose not to read. In it I recognized the lesser part of me: the materialism, the preoccupation with mortality. My wish to do computational biology grew out of a desire to cure “all” human disease, as I wrote in every application essay for college and for my PhD. I used to think of this as a noble calling. I still do. But set against Paul’s responsibility as a neurosurgeon—to determine a life or sentence a death—and against his utter helplessness when the fate turned out to be his own, I caught in my long-held desire a tinge of personal indulgence. Part of me, it turns out, doesn’t care so much that all diseases be cured, but about who the one curing them. That is, a legacy in my name, an immortal trace after me. And if an agentic system is good enough for drug discovery, that one won’t be me. Honestly, it might not be any of the eighty percent of us at this conference.

The fear was real, and I was ashamed of it. Next to me, two professors I didn’t recognize were chatting. Dan Yamins paced on the phone, debating enthusiastically even though he’d delivered a talk only an hour before. A capybara slipped across the bushes, and two students crept after it with a camera, careful not to scare it off. I then came across this line:

Our patients’ lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn’t. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients. You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.

You can’t reach perfection, but you should try anyway. The more I sat with it, the more I saw that the tide I’d been bracing against was never the agents at all. It’s the old one—disease, death, the stubborn imperfection of the world—the same tide Paul wrote about, the one that almost always wins in the end. All of us chose this field because we have this dream: we will win, someday we will win!

The agents aren’t on the far side of it. They’re in the water with us, pulling the same direction, and they pull harder than we ever could alone. That should be a relief, and most of me knows it is. Most of us do.

What’s left is smaller and more honest: not a fear of AI, but a fear of being small beside it. And maybe that’s exactly what the lawn was telling me. Dan still on the phone, the students chasing their capybara—none of it looked like a last stand. It looked like people leaning together, no matter how prominent they are, toward an asymptote none of us will reach, with better instruments than we had before. My contribution may be indistinguishable from noise even after years of hard work, if I were to be unlucky, but the striving is real and shared, and the tools, the agents, are part of it now; and there is a place in the water for anyone willing to keep pulling. I think I’d be very happy to contribute in this heroic social cause that we launched together centuries ago.

I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, / Hoping to cease not till death.

— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”