Lacuna

Lacuna is an AI-for-science system built to say no. Most discovery tools are optimized to generate more hypotheses. Lacuna focuses on the harder scientific step: rejecting weak ones before they become convincing stories. Built with Claude Code, Opus 4.7, and Claude Managed Agents, Lacuna proposes candidate biological laws, then sends them through a fixed five-test Python gate. The AI cannot change the rules after seeing the result. Failed candidates are saved as useful scientific evidence, not treated as wasted work. On a public kidney cancer dataset with 505 patients, Lacuna rejected 194 of 203 candidate laws. One simple survivor, TOP2A − EPAS1, matched a known kidney-cancer growth program. That was the point: this is not presented as a new biological discovery, but as a methodology proof that the system can rediscover known truth under strict rules. That survivor also passed an independent survival test in a kidney cancer clinical-trial dataset. A later three-gene extension proposed by the system failed the same gate. The broader goal is a repeatable scientific discipline: propose, test, reject, remember, and only then interpret.