🧬 The story behind AlphaFold and this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry

It was an acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in chemistry 52 years ago that led to this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry.

The 1972 prize winner, Christian Anfinsen, believed then that one day it would be possible to predict the appearance of a protein just by knowing the sequence of amino acids that build it.

Proteins are our body's workhorses. They convert food into energy that we can use, fight against intruders and transport oxygen in the blood – and much more. Understanding proteins is therefore very important to understand our body, diseases that attack it and develop effective medicines. I

n his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in chemistry, 1972, the prize winner Christian Anfinsen believed that one day it would be possible to predict the appearance of a protein just by knowing the sequence of amino acids that build it.

Finding out how a protein looks, how it folds, can be done in a lab, but often takes several years and can cost millions of kronor. Just in the human body there are hundreds of thousands of proteins and in other species millions of proteins.

This challenge researchers have tried to solve for 50 years. No one came even close. Until DeepMind developed an AI. Called AlphaFold after its predecessor AlphaGo, which played the board game Go.

I have in two previous texts told the story of how AlphaFold cracked a 50-year-old "grand challenge" within biology.

If you want to read the story of how a series of games and competitions led to AlphaFold, you can find it in 🧬 From games to science breakthrough - the story of AlphaFold

🧬 From games to science breakthrough - the story of AlphaFold

The history of computers competing against humans is long, and often attracts enormous attention. But what is it good for? What does it matter if a computer can win in chess, Go, or Starcraft? We got the answer when AlphaFold solved a 50-year old grand challenge in biology.

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

What this has led to I described after the journal Science named both DeepMind's AlphaFold and David Baker's RoseTTAFold as the Breakthrough of the Year: 🧫 An incredible breakthrough – which almost no one has heard of

🧫 An incredible breakthrough – which almost no one has heard of

Humans have struggled with one of the grand challenges of biology, namely understanding how proteins are designed. Suddenly, last year, it was solved by an AI. The event happened to be the start of something even greater…

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

Now many will hear about this achievement! That makes me very happy!

While many have spent their time claiming that AI will kill us all, alternatively is a bubble, readers of Warp News have been able to follow what fantastic things are coming out of the AI revolution.

Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist