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 curtain call

One of the true accomplishments of the Trump administration was its effort to ensure a free and fair election in 2020, led by Chris Krebs. In 2017, at age 40, he became Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Infrastructure Protection. In 2018, he became Under Secretary of Homeland Security for the National Protection and Programs Directorate and a few months later, the first Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Krebs helped state and local election officials protect election integrity by (among other things) securing paper ballots that could verify results in the event of recounts. No more hanging chads, a “nightmare that goes on haunting” after the 2000 Florida debacle. Like an ironic, dystopian novel, the Trump administration’s good work, led by Krebs, countered his narrative that the election was “stolen.” On November 17, 2020, Trump fired Krebs for telling the truth.

It’s sad that the Big Lie will be Trump’s enduring legacy. It’s sadder that obeisance to this false narrative is now a litmus test of loyalty to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. The saddest part is that a significant percentage of our country accepts the lie and no longer supports democracy. In the midst of this mess, a Chris Krebs curtain call is appropriate. He is now Chief Intelligence and Public Policy Officer at SentinelOne, a fast-growing cybersecurity company.

From “SentinelOne to acquire cybersecurity consulting firm Krebs Stamos Group,” by Jonathan Greig, The Record, November 9, 2023.