This is an achievement that answers one big scientific question but raises more fundamental ones for society
Has one of the most important questions of science now been answered? From the headlines you might think so. For some biology’s “holy grail” had been found. For others planetary extinction could be averted. On the surface the news seemed rather mundane. Google’s artificial intelligence company DeepMind won an international competition that asked entrants to predict how proteins fold in three dimensions given only the sequences of their chemical links, or amino acids.
Set up in 1994, progress in the “Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction” (CASP) race had almost come to a halt. Many in the field had given up hope they would live to see a solution. However, in 2018 DeepMind had won the “protein Olympics” by some distance. This year its AlphaFold2 software lapped the opposition. While it was a great leap for CASP, it seemed a small step for humanity. DeepMind trained a neural network on protein-structure databases to learn what proteins look like. It did so by rapidly learning what evolutionary adaptations had occurred over millennia and using those insights in its guesses.
