The news: A bill that allows clinics to sell unproven treatments has been passed in Montana. Under the legislation, doctors can apply for a license to open an experimental treatment clinic and recommend and sell therapies not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to their patients.
Why it matters: Once it’s signed by the governor, the law will be the most expansive in the country in allowing access to drugs that have not been fully tested. The bill allows for any drug produced in the state to be sold in it, providing it has been through phase I clinical trials—but these trials do not determine if the drug is effective.
The big picture: The bill was drafted and lobbied for by people interested in extending human lifespans. And these longevity enthusiasts are hoping Montana will serve as a test bed for opening up access to experimental drugs. Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
Google DeepMind’s new AI agent cracks real-world problems better than humans can
Google DeepMind has once again used large language models to discover new solutions to long-standing problems in math and computer science. This time the firm has shown that its approach can not only tackle unsolved theoretical puzzles, but improve a range of important real-world processes as well.
The new tool, called AlphaEvolve, uses large language models (LLMs) to produce code for a wide range of different tasks. LLMs are known to be hit and miss at coding. The twist here is that AlphaEvolve scores each of Gemini’s suggestions, throwing out the bad and tweaking the good, in an iterative process, until it has produced the best algorithm it can. In many cases, the results are more efficient or more accurate than the best existing (human-written) solutions.Read the full story.
—Will Douglas Heaven