AlphaFold

Yesterday’s post was about the documentary film The Thinking Game, the story of Demis Hassabis and his team at DeepMind, who developed AlphaFold. My friend Ernie Stokely is a Professor Emeritus of Biomedical Engineering. He is retired from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and has relocated to the Southwest to be nearer family. After reading yesterday’s blog post, Ernie sent this message, which I post here with his permission:

I watched the 1 hour documentary on the AlphaFold development. It was terrific! Every person who works in science dreams of being on a team that makes a profound discovery like this.

I remember 30 years ago at UAB we had one of the largest supercomputers in the U.S. in the School of Engineering. One of the chief subscribers of computer time was a molecular biologist from the medical side of the campus. He was trying to understand the structure of a peptide, which is a small protein. He had installed a protein folding program on our supercomputer. It ran for a week 24 hours a day to solve this small protein structure!

How a protein is folded tells one almost everything about how that protein chemically interacts with other molecules in the body. When I read about AlphaFold, my jaw dropped. 1) People have no idea how difficult this problem is, and how long scientists have worked on trying to solve it. 2) The very idea of solving the folding, or conformation, of 200 million proteins (we only have 20,000-25,000 in our body!) is absurd on the face of it. No doubt there will be many drugs that are forthcoming from this work. Add to that the breakthrough of CRISPR, and biomolecular science just vaulted ahead by 100 years. We already are seeing tailor-made drugs to treat individuals based on their particular genetic or other unique biological profile.

And they made the code open source!

From “AlphaFold Protein Structure Database,” Developed by Google DeepMind and EMBL-EBI.

AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem solving, decision making, creativity and autonomy.

I first heard of AI three years ago from a tech-savvy friend who understood its potential. About two years ago I noticed AI’s impact on the stock market. I noticed an increase in algorithmic trading. I noticed the surging value of Ai-related stocks (particularly Nvidia).

Our son Rob, who uses ChatGPT as a personal consultant, sent me a link to The Thinking Game, an excellent documentary about Demis Hassabis and his British group of AI pioneers. A 1 minute, 20 second trailer is available at YouTube, as well as the 1 hour, 24-minute documentary. I was spell-bound.

From “Accelerating Scientific Study with AI,” Demis Hassabis’ Lecture after he and colleague John Jumper received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, December 8, 2024.

Hassabis was a chess prodigy, on track to be a professional chess player. At age 12, at the end of a day-long match, he marveled at the brain power in the room of 300 chess players, but wondered what could happen if that kind of brain power could be networked to solve the world’s problems. In that moment, he found a reason for living beyond chess.