Google Gives $20M to Speed Up Science With AI

Imagine cutting the time to detect drug-resistant bacteria from days to under an hour, or finally understanding the 99% of human DNA that remains a mystery. Thanks to a $20 million investment from Google.org, twelve teams of scientists are using artificial intelligence to make these breakthroughs happen faster than ever before.

The timing couldn't be more critical. Despite facing increasingly complex global challenges, the pace of scientific discovery has actually been slowing down in recent years. Google.org is betting that artificial intelligence can restart the engine of progress.

The funded projects span health, agriculture, and environmental science. UW Medicine is using AI to map the mysterious 99% of the human genome, searching for genetic clues to rare diseases. Spore.Bio, a French startup, is developing an AI scanner that could identify life-threatening bacteria in under an hour instead of the days hospitals currently wait.

In agriculture, scientists are using AI to crack problems that once required years of field trials. The Sainsbury Laboratory is building "Bifrost," which predicts how plant immune systems will respond to diseases just by reading genome sequences. That means disease-resistant crops could reach farms much faster.

The Periodic Table of Food Initiative is tackling nutrition from a completely new angle. They're using AI to catalog thousands of unknown molecules that determine how healthy and flavorful our food is, potentially allowing scientists to design better diets from the molecular level up.

Climate solutions are getting attention too. UC Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Institute is using AI to decode cow gut bacteria, hunting for ways to edit their microbiomes and dramatically reduce methane emissions from livestock. The Swiss Plasma Center is standardizing fusion energy data worldwide so AI can learn from collective experiments and potentially speed up the path to clean, unlimited energy.

The Rockefeller University is overhauling how we sequence genomes for Earth's 1.8 million species, creating blueprints that could guide conservation and unlock new medicines. Meanwhile, the UN's biodiversity monitoring center is deploying AI to scan millions of scientific records and map where all 350,000 known plant species actually live, filling critical gaps that hamper conservation efforts today.

The Ripple Effect

What makes this investment special is the commitment to open science. Every team has agreed to make their datasets and solutions publicly available, meaning breakthroughs funded today could spark innovations nobody has imagined yet. A better understanding of how cells communicate could revolutionize drug testing. Faster bacteria detection in one hospital could save lives in thousands more.

The Technical University of Munich is building an open-source model that simulates how diseases progress through the body, allowing doctors to test treatments digitally before prescribing them. In Uganda, researchers are using existing open AI tools to predict how malaria parasites develop drug resistance, helping African health systems stay one step ahead.

These twelve teams aren't just solving today's problems faster—they're changing how science itself works, with AI and humans collaborating to compress decades of research into years.