Decoding life with AI

7 PM, 7 Jul 2025

Mikhail Burtsev explains how artificial intelligence is helping to decipher genomes in the Royal Institution’s iconic lecture theatre.

Artificial Intelligence is revolutionising our understanding of life. The DeepMind programme tackling the protein folding problem, AlphaFold, ushered in a new era for protein structure prediction and earned its creators last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. But that was just the beginning.

Speaking in the historic lecture theatre of the Royal Institution, Dr Mikhail Burtsev gives a tour of the leading-edge biological applications of AI, including his own, that are now making complex biological insights more accessible than ever before. AI chatbots such as ChatGPT are trained on human language, but these new AI models are instead fed billions of real DNA sequence, allowing them to perform astonishing feats like designing new biological molecules—or even whole new bacterial genomes. Their ultimate goal is to solve perhaps the most fundamental problem in all of biology—reading and understanding life’s genetic blueprint from beginning to end.

Event information

This event takes place in the lecture theatre at the Royal Institution. London Institute guests are invited to join the speaker after for drinks in our private rooms.

Decoding life with AI
Decoding life with AI
Decoding life with AI
Decoding life with AI
Decoding life with AI
Decoding life with AI
Decoding life with AI
Decoding life with AI
Decoding life with AI
Decoding life with AI
Decoding life with AI
Decoding life with AI
Decoding life with AI
Decoding life with AI
Decoding life with AI
Decoding life with AI

Speaker

Mikhail Burtsev

Mikhail Burtsev is a Landau AI Fellow at the London Institute. He was Scientific Director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Moscow, and founded and ran the Neural Nets and Deep Learning Lab at MIPT. He researches the mathematics behind more intelligent AI.