Dishing the Dirt

“On our way into his lab, we passed a bench piled with bags of dirt—one from the Chihuahuan Desert, another from the Sonoran Desert. ‘My parents sent me those during the pandemic,’ Brady told me. He has been given soil from Saudi Arabia and the Serengeti; his collaborators have gathered samples in Mexican sinkholes and Australian grasslands.” What’s all the dirt for? Finding new drugs. Dhruv Khullar in The New Yorker on how the AI revolution is coming to a pharmacy near you. How Machines Learned to Discover Drugs.