AI Meets Lab-Made Life? The Vision of Bhatnagar Awardee Dibyendu Das

Prof Dibyendu Das from IISER Kolkata, the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award-winning Scientist, is pushing the envelope in the Systems Chemistry world by doing something incredible: giving "life-like" behaviour to lifeless chemicals. This recognition, he says, is not just a milestone in his life but an acknowledgement of his department and the fast-emerging field of Systems Chemistry per se.

Das works with simple chemical substances that, in their natural form, show no signs of life. However, under specific chemical processes, these inert molecules start to act like living organisms — they grow, self-organize, divide and eventually break down. This is reminiscent of how life is presumed to have first taken root on Earth. The experimental materials his team creates are essentially “life-like matter”, made from simple chemical building blocks.

During the next 15 years, his aspiration is to significantly progress this work to understand in much greater detail the chemical origins of life. The field he leads, Systems Chemistry, is at the junction between chemistry, physics, biology, and engineering. Indeed, such a goal is basic and philosophical: to learn about how life arose, how living systems evolved into the complex organisms that populate the world today. This is an approach which requires that a scientist be a polyglot of many scientific languages.

While artificial intelligence is rewriting the future of work and cognition, Das believes in a natural convergence between AI and artificial life. While artificial life originally comes from chemistry and AI from technology, he thinks that the two will complement each other in times to come: the chemical design of life-like systems may one day underpin novel forms of AI, and AI in turn will be required for further advances in chemical life-modelling. However, he points out, the dream of actually replicating human-like emotional intelligence or behavior still remains far away. Human emotions are deeply rooted in the complex architecture of the brain, and artificial life research stands only at its foundational stage.

Even so, he foresees powerful medical applications well before that. One day, these life-like materials could act as smart therapeutic agents inside the body, recognizing biological needs and delivering active drugs only when necessary. Unlike today's conventional medicines, which flood the body and produce side effects, these could store excess medication and release it precisely where and when it is needed, improving treatment and reducing drug toxicity. Das also comments on the research infrastructure and funding in India. In fact, government support for scientific research had increased, and funding from the Anusandhan National Research Foundation managed to strengthen the ecosystem. Where once financial constraints prevented experimental research, Indian scientists-who have been pushing the boundaries of discovery-now see conditions improving.