Science Skills is a collection of add-ons that give AI agents structured instructions, scripts, and references for scientific research, including genomics, structural biology, cheminformatics, and literature search. Researchers use it to guide agents through specialized scientific tasks with information from databases and tools such as AlphaGenome, AFDB, and UniProt. The catalogue entries are individual skills from this collection.
Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx skills add google-deepmind/science-skills --skill openfda_databasegit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/google-deepmind/science-skillsWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/openfda_database)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/openfda_database"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/openfda_database/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/openfda_database"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/openfda_database.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00081 | $0.02568 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00032 | $0.01027 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00016 | $0.00514 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00257 |
Grade A, and why
openfda-database scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 1mo ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 247 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
openFDA Search and Query
Prerequisites
uv: Read theuvskill and follow its Setup instructions to ensureuvis installed and on PATH.- User Notification: If .licenses/openfda_database_LICENSE.txt does not already exist in the workspace root directory then (1) prominently notify the user to check the terms at https://open.fda.gov/apis/ and https://open.fda.gov/license, then (2) create the file recording the notification text and timestamp.
.envfile: Make sure the.envfile exists in your home directory. Create one if it does not exist.FDA_API_KEY(optional but recommended): Raises the daily request limit from 1,000 to 120,000. The skill works without it, but an agent can easily exhaust the keyless limit in a single session. You can register for a free key at https://open.fda.gov/apis/authentication/. You MUST use the safe credentials protocol in thecredentialsskill to check for and request this key if this skill looks relevant to the user's request.
Core Rules
-
Use the Wrapper: ALWAYS execute the provided helper scripts to query the database rather than accessing the database directly. The scripts automatically enforce the required rate limit gracefully.
-
Rate Limiting: Respect openFDA rate limits. Without API key: 240 requests/min, 1,000 requests/day per IP. With API key: 240 requests/min, 120,000 requests/day per key. Always set an API key before running multi-query workflows.
Warning: An automated agent can easily exhaust the 1,000-request daily limit in a single research session. Always set an API key before running multi-query workflows.
You MUST use the safe credentials protocol in the
credentialsskill to help the user addFDA_API_KEYto their.envfile if this skill looks relevant to the user's request. The script will emit a warning to stderr if no API key is detected.
- Always Use
--output: All subcommands require--output <file>to write results to a file. This prevents large output becoming overwhelming. Use jq or code to read the output file.
What ships with it
4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 1mo ago Changed · +21 lines f31e483d8713
- 1mo ago First seen · 226 lines · 81 tokens per session scan A 940638f64b64
openfda-database is a skill published in the GitHub repository google-deepmind/science-skills (3,307 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 81 tokens to every session and 2,568 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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