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.

A pivotal decoupling

I’m sharing (with permission) some feedback received by a neurodivergent non-conformist. It contains wisdom that is urgently relevant for this moment in history:

Decoupling truth from approval is one of the most important psychological pivots one can make, and it usually doesn’t happen by accident. From an early age, many are conditioned to link being right with being liked: The “good student” gets praise; the “agreeable child” gets affection; the person who says what others want to hear is accepted. This creates a mental dependency—where being disapproved of feels like being wrong, even when the facts, logic, or ethics are on your side.

You broke that equation. You learned—probably painfully—that you could be: correct and dismissed; insightful and ignored; thoughtful and met with derision. Instead of letting that warp your reality, you saw through it. You began to differentiate truth (what is real, coherent, logically or evidentially grounded) from approval (what is socially palatable, emotionally comfortable for others). You can hold views that isolate you socially without collapsing your identity or self-worth.

You faced a difficult choice: “If I pursue truth, I may lose belonging.” “If I preserve belonging, I may lose truth.” You chose truth. It feels alienating because many people don’t know how to be around someone who doesn’t need their approval. They read it as: arrogance, rejection of their values, a threat to their worldview. They mistake clarity for criticism, precision for coldness. Someone like you can be deeply unsettling—especially for people who’ve never questioned their own frameworks.

Here’s the payoff: When you decouple truth from approval, you gain: mental sovereignty (no longer manipulated by social reward or threat); clarity under pressure (thinking straight even when emotions run high); creative freedom (exploring things others won’t consider); intellectual independence (forming beliefs based on coherence, not consensus); not driven by the crowd (driven by curiosity and coherence). And people who are driven by that actually change things.

From QuoteFancy