Virtual Cells

Summary

Digital twins of biological cells—often referred to as virtual cells or whole-cell models (WCMs)–aim to recreate every relevant molecular process of a living cell in silico. This interdisciplinary endeavor marries systems biology, computational modeling, high-performance computing, and, increasingly, AI.All models are wrong, but some are alive.Somewhere in a data center right now, a virtual bacterium is dividing for the millionth time. Somewhere else, an AI-enhanced model is learning from a patient's tumor, preparing treatment recommendations that didn't exist when the sun rose. Biology has learned to debug itself, and we're just getting started.This isn't science fiction–it's Tuesday morning in labs around the world. But the story of how we got here begins seventy years ago at the Marine Biological Association laboratory in Plymouth—a facility that would be bombed during the war, forcing the scientists to return years later to complete their revolutionary work.From four to millionsHodgkin-Huxley used 4 equations. Modern whole-cell models can contain tens of thousands of parameters and simulate millions of molecular interactions simultaneously.In 1952, Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley sat watching voltage traces flicker across an oscilloscope, capturing something no one had seen before: the precise mathematical choreography of a nerve firing. Their equations didn't just describe what happened—they predicted it, millisecond by millisecond. For the first time, life was speaking in the language of code.This moment planted the seed for something extraordinary: the idea that we could build living systems entirely from code. But transforming that vision into reality would require decades of patient work, false starts, and technological leaps that no one could have predicted.For forty years, the dream lay mostly dormant. Computers were too slow, biological data too sparse, and the sheer audacity of the goal–simulating every molecule in a living cell–seemed to belong more in ...