They did surgery on a grape is a 2018 meme that has lived rent-free in my head for eight years. (Don’t ask why, because I don’t have an answer.) It’s being evicted, though, by something that actually happened: AI did surgery on a mouse.
AI agents chose and injected a gene therapy into a live mouse’s brain is a sentence that would’ve bewildered 2018 me. But it’s 2026, and researchers are using agents to do all sorts of things in the physical world, from off-the-shelf models maneuvering a Toyota to get In-N-Out to injecting experimental drugs into mice’s brains.
Emily Mullin got the scoop on how AI agents did surgery and why researchers tried it in the first place. On the “how” front, biotech founder Gabriel Ocana Santero set up an automated rig that allowed AI to control the injection of an experimental gene therapy to treat seizures.
While a human performed the complicated task of the craniotomy, Santero let an agent choose and administer a gene therapy. He and his team first gave Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 a chance, but the model balked and suggested it might stop midway through the surgery, endangering the animal. (Humans had the ability to stop the procedure at any time.)
Claude Sonnet 5 had no such problems, though. It controlled a robotic arm and needle to successfully administer the treatment. There were some hiccups along the way that required enlisting another agent to troubleshoot, and I encourage you to read the full story to see how the whole thing unfolded and pictures of the setup.
Which brings us to the “why” part. Anthropic has prioritized biotech, and there are a host of other AI startups focused on life sciences. But models are trained primarily on published scientific literature. That means they may miss important information about the research process, including failed experiments, unexpected observations, and decisions scientists make in real time.
Integrating AI models with real-world experiments can make the models more reliable, Santero says. Will AI one day do surgery on a human? While 2026 me is bewildered at that prospect, future me might one day go under the robotic knife without a second thought.
Oh, and as for the mouse, it’s doing totally fine.
Also on my radar: cremations. In Europe, crematoria are increasingly being used to provide heat for everything from homes to swimming pools. It might sound a little macabre, but the heat from furnaces is already harvested as part of the process to clean the flue gas of heavy metals and pollution. And in Europe, the district heating systems that are common on the continent and in the UK are an ideal way to put that heat to use.
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