How Did AlphaFold Beat Decades of Protein Research?

David Senra, reading Sebastian Mallaby, says AlphaFold let a DeepMind team, numbering perhaps 20 at its peak, defeat hundreds of academic scientists who had spent decades on protein folding.

Demis Hassabis had been obsessed with solving protein folding since college. Senra says the work is what Hassabis is going to win the Nobel Prize for. Hassabis thought AI had progressed sufficiently to solve the problem for the first time in human history. Proteins are the building blocks of life. They provide the structure and the function of organs and muscles, hormones and hair, blood and brain cells. Predicting the complex shapes proteins assume was fascinating in its own right and almost certain to unlock medical advances. Knowing the structure of proteins would help researchers come up with drug molecules that could bind to protein surfaces. Knowing how the structures formed might unlock cures for Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, since both diseases were thought to be linked to incorrectly folded proteins.

When DeepMind's project was completed, the company gifted its results to science, so researchers all over the world could make free use of the discovery.