[HN Gopher] Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and pr...
___________________________________________________________________
Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure
prediction
Author : mitchbob
Score : 471 points
Date : 2024-10-09 09:54 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nobelprize.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nobelprize.org)
| nialv7 wrote:
| People joked maybe the Nobel committee is holding some AI stocks.
| Now I start to wonder if that is true...
| ramraj07 wrote:
| This is legitimately deserved though.
| nialv7 wrote:
| These two aren't mutually exclusive.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| It does make the first speculation a whole lot less
| plausible though
| astrange wrote:
| Maybe the transformers authors will win Literature.
| joelthelion wrote:
| They are indeed the largest contributors of new books
| published on Amazon...
| Ekaros wrote:
| I would actually not even be mad. After all it is fundamental
| change in production of literature works.
| InkCanon wrote:
| Next up: The Nobel peace prize is awarded to ChatGPT, because
| virtually all communiques and peace treaties will be generated
| by lazy lawyers.
| seydor wrote:
| The opposite would be less likely nowadays
| paulwetzel wrote:
| While I am skeptical about yesterdays award in physics, these are
| totally deserved and spot on. There are few approaches that will
| accelerate the field of drug development and chemistry as a whole
| in a way that the works of these three people will.
| Congratulations!
| ackbar03 wrote:
| I was just wondering when they were going to award the
| alphafold2 guys the nobel after after seeing Hinton win the
| physics one. 100% agree, all three of them totally deserve this
| one. Baker's lab is pretty much keeping Deepmind in check at
| this point and ensuring open source research is keeping up.
| Hats off
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Baker has been in the protein folding game for a long time
| and was the leader before Alphafold came in... His generative
| paper came out what last year (2023)?
|
| I mean this is a fast award cycle.
| divbzero wrote:
| David Baker's RoseTTAFold was first released in 2021.
|
| [1]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj8754
|
| [2]: https://cen.acs.org/analytical-chemistry/structural-
| biology/...
| tomp wrote:
| Are they? What did Demis do?
| world2vec wrote:
| He's founder and CEO of the AI lab that build Alphafold?
| devilzhong wrote:
| Then maybe Sergey and Larry should also get the prize since
| they founded Google, which owns Deepmind?
| world2vec wrote:
| They were not equal contributors to the seminal paper
| that got the prize. From another post in this thread:
|
| "These authors contributed equally: John Jumper, Richard
| Evans, Alexander Pritzel, Tim Green, Michael Figurnov,
| Olaf Ronneberger, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Russ Bates,
| Augustin Zidek, Anna Potapenko, Alex Bridgland, Clemens
| Meyer, Simon A. A. Kohl, Andrew J. Ballard, Andrew Cowie,
| Bernardino Romera-Paredes, Stanislav Nikolov, Rishub
| Jain, Demis Hassabis"
| theGnuMe wrote:
| They bought it and it runs autonomously (or did mostly)
| onursurme wrote:
| He writes software in different areas, so he has the
| potential to get a Nobel prize in any area soon.
| seydor wrote:
| didn't he lead early successes in RL which popularized it and
| culminated in protein prediction?
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| Both Rosetta and DeepMind have made contributions outside of
| protein structure prediction that are far more important for
| drug discovery.
| mihaaly wrote:
| The physics prize should have went to Elon Musk!
|
| Also I really hope the Nobel Prize of Economics goes to Bill
| Gates! He facilitated sooo much advances by releasing Excel
| that this must be recognized!
|
| And based on this year's announcements so far I am not sure
| that my sarcastic comments should be taken as a joke!
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Except Excel has introduced way to many bugs and how many
| people has it killed?
| trott wrote:
| > There are few approaches that will accelerate the field of
| drug development and chemistry as a whole in a way that the
| works of these three people will.
|
| As the author of one such approach, I'm skeptical.
|
| AlphaFold 2 just predicts protein structures. The thing about
| proteins is that they are often related to each other. If you
| are trying to predict the structure of a naturally occurring
| protein, chances are that there are related ones in the dataset
| of known 3D structures. This makes it much easier for ML. You
| are (roughly speaking) training on the test set.
|
| However, for drug design, which is what AlphaFold 3 targets,
| you need to do well on actually _novel_ inputs. It 's a
| completely different use case.
|
| More here: https://olegtrott.substack.com/p/are-alphafolds-new-
| results-...
| jhbadger wrote:
| Protein structures are similar to each other because of
| evolution (protein families exist because of shared ancestry
| of protein coding genes). It's not a weird coincidence that
| helps ML; it's inherent in the problem. Same with drug design
| -- very, very, few drugs are "novel" as opposed to being
| analogues of something naturally in the body.
| svara wrote:
| They're referring to the structure of the protein when a
| drug is bound, that's what's novel. Novel as in, you can't
| think of it as "just" interpolation between known
| structures of evolutionarily related proteins.
|
| That said I'm not sure that's entirely fair, since
| Alphafold does, as far as I know, work for predicting
| structures that are far away from structures that have
| previously been measured.
|
| You're quite wrong about small molecule drug structures.
| Historically that has been the case but these days many
| lead structures are made by combinatorial chemistry and are
| not derived from natural products.
| jhbadger wrote:
| But even drugs made by combinatorial chemistry still
| generally end up being analogues of natural products even
| if they aren't derived from them. As Leslie Orgel said
| "Evolution is cleverer than you are"; chemists are
| unlikely to discover a mechanism of action that millions
| of years of evolution hasn't already found.
| adastra22 wrote:
| > Alphafold does, as far as I know, work for predicting
| structures that are far away from structures that have
| previously been measured.
|
| It did very poorly at this last time I checked. Maybe
| AlphaFold3 is better?
| trott wrote:
| > It's not a weird coincidence that helps ML; it's inherent
| in the problem.
|
| This depends on the application. If you are trying to
| design new proteins for something, unconstrained by
| evolution, you may want a method that does well on novel
| inputs.
|
| > Same with drug design
|
| Not by a long shot. There are maybe on the order of 10,000
| known 3D protein-ligand(drug) structures. Meanwhile, when
| doing drug discovery, people scan drug libraries with
| millions to billions of molecules (using my software,
| oftentimes). These molecules will be very poorly
| represented in the training data.
|
| The theoretical chemical space of interest to drug
| discovery is bigger still, with on the order of 1e60
| molecules in it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_space
| rswail wrote:
| The physics prize was a stretch of the definition of the word
| "physics", but this one is purely about chemistry.
| onursurme wrote:
| Not purely. It includes a software development about Chemistry.
| seydor wrote:
| every science includes software development for a few decades
| now
| gilleain wrote:
| David Baker (and colleagues) have always done good work. I guess
| google have done some things also.
|
| (lol - one of the PDF attachments to that page is 'Illustration:
| A string of amino acids' : actually it's a bit better than the
| title implies :).
|
| Actually, Figure 2 - "How does AlfaFold2 Work?" is impressive to
| fit that on one page. Nice.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| It is well known around here that Baker does very, very little
| of the work. He is extremely good at putting his name on his
| students' work though (this is par for the course in
| academia)... and removing theirs (this is the bad part). At
| least he bribes them with lots of happy hours!
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| username...checks out
| alexmolas wrote:
| And the literature Nobel will go for ChatGPT
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Eventually, potentially 10 years away if we continue to see
| improvements.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Yes eventually GPT itself may be capable of winning a Nobel
| off its own writing but before then..the authors of the
| Transformer might win one ? Certainly seems a lot more
| plausible now.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Haha, wrote the exact same.
| gizajob wrote:
| Whoa. Happy for Demis today. Amazing achievement.
| joelthelion wrote:
| Did Demis Hasabis actually do any scientific work himself?
| FL33TW00D wrote:
| I mean he took the risk and founded DeepMind?
| belter wrote:
| So then Mustafa Suleyman and Shane Legg will want a Nobel
| also?
| onursurme wrote:
| He is a chemist now.
| seydor wrote:
| Yes in neuroscience. But i guess this one is recognition for
| leading efforts in RL which culminated in this.
| sikimiki wrote:
| Well deserved! Especially for Alphafold. It is the most impactful
| invention in structural biology this century along with Cryo-EM.
| onursurme wrote:
| It doesn't deserve a Chemistry Nobel prize. It deserves a prize
| about computers.
| seydor wrote:
| physiology&medicine more likely
| Mklomoto wrote:
| So the Nobel commite was wrong to decide this because you
| think otherwise?
|
| Interesting. Any more indepth analys about this?
|
| Btw. you don't just build AlphaFold by doing only
| 'computers'. Take a look at any good docmentary about it and
| you will see that they do discuss chemistry on a deep level
| swyx wrote:
| tldr on Cryo-EM?
| proto-n wrote:
| Now this one makes more sense. Chemistry Nobel for advancing
| chemistry using AI.
|
| Contrast that with Phyics Nobel for advancing AI using physics.
| Muller20 wrote:
| AlphaFold is also a high impact discovery, while Hopfield
| networks have very little to do with modern AI and they are
| only a very interesting toy model right now.
| lennertjansen wrote:
| well deserved
| aborsy wrote:
| The AlphaFold paper has countless authors, many researchers and
| company resources underlying it. Hassabis' contribution is
| management of resources and entrepreneurship, not the actual
| science. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists out there
| doing deep technical work, and they aren't recognized.
|
| I think we might be the end of it, as the emphasis shifts to
| commercialization and product development.
|
| These AI demonstrations require so many GPUs, specialized
| hardware and data that nobody has but the biggest players.
| Moreover, they are engineering work, not really scientistic
| (putting together a lot of hacks and tweaks). Meanwhile, the
| person who led the transformer paper (a key ingredient in LLMs)
| hasn't been recognized.
|
| This will incentivize scientists to focus on management of other
| researchers who will manage other researchers who will produce
| the technical inventions. The same issue arises with citations
| and indices, and the general reward structure in academia.
|
| The signal these AI events convey to me: You better focus on
| practical stuff, and you better move on in the management ladder.
| world2vec wrote:
| Hasn't it always been like that? The lab director gets to
| receive the prize, not the whole team (which could have
| hundreds or thousands of people).
| bonoboTP wrote:
| The Nobel prize is aimed at the general public. It has a kind
| of late 19th century progressive humanistic ethos. It's science
| outreach. This way, at least once a year, the everyday
| layperson hears about scientific discoveries.
|
| The Nobel isn't a vehicle to recognize hundreds of thousands of
| deeply technical scientific researchers. How could it be? They
| have to pick a symbolic figurehead to represent a breakthrough.
|
| They could also simply give it to "DeepMind" similar to how
| they give the peace prize to orgs sometimes, or how the Time
| Person of the Year is sometimes something abstract as well
| (like the cutesy "You" of 2006). But it would be silly. Just
| deal with it, we can't "recognize" hundreds of thousands, and
| we want to see a personal face, not a logo of a company getting
| the award. That's how we are, better learn to deal with it.
| dsign wrote:
| > The Nobel prize is aimed at the general public...
|
| Which is okay. The Nobel prize is okay.
|
| > This way, at least once a year, the everyday layperson
| hears about scientific discoveries.
|
| Spot on.
|
| The problem we have is that the everyday layperson hears very
| little about scientific discoveries. The scientists
| themselves, one in a million of them, can get a Nobel prize.
| The rest, if they are lucky, get a somewhat okay salary.
| Sometimes better than that of a software engineer. Almost
| always worse working hours.
|
| But I suppose it's all for the best. Imagine a world where a
| good scientist, one that knows everything about biology and
| protein folding, gets to avoid cancer and even aging, while
| the everyday layperson can only go to the doctor...
| madmask wrote:
| That would be a good incentive to become a good scientist
| mrguyorama wrote:
| At least one American Nobel laureate has had to sell his
| nobel prize medal to pay for medical costs in their old
| age.
|
| Just insane.
| adw wrote:
| > Sometimes better than that of a software engineer
|
| There is a reason so many of us work as software engineers
| now; I earn about 5x more than I would as a university
| lecturer/assistant professor.
| pyb wrote:
| The paper has a mention : "These authors contributed equally:
| ..."
|
| However, it appears that some the authors were more equal than
| others.
| falcor84 wrote:
| The Nobel prize isn't awarded for a paper. Even if (and
| that's a large if) all of these contributed equally to the
| results in the paper, some obviously did more than others to
| prepare the ground for that study.
| mhandley wrote:
| The Nobel prize cannot go to a team so they have to pick
| individuals. This is true for many (most?) nobel prize awards.
| Consider for example the discovery of gravity waves - the team
| that built and operated LIGO was huge, but they have to pick.
| This has commonly been the case since the inception of the
| prizes - the professor gets the prize, the PhD students and
| postdocs don't usually. Not saying this is right, but it's the
| way it is.
| elashri wrote:
| For gravitational waves discovery, Nobel prize went to the
| designers of the LIGO which was done long before we actually
| built it. The example that will fit more your idea would be
| Carlo Rubbia who got the award in 1984 for leading the CERN
| team who discovered the W and Z bosons. He did not have any
| contributions than leading the experiment that did it [1]. It
| is not like he designed or proposed the way we used to detect
| them. And the Nobel prize for higgs discovery went to
| theorists who proposed and predict it not the experimental
| physicists (thousands) who discovered it in 2012.
|
| [1] https://home.cern/science/experiments/ua1
| erk__ wrote:
| It is only the Peace Prize that may be given to more than 3
| people, which have been done 30 times:
| https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/nobel-prize-
| awarded-...
| abm53 wrote:
| I did raise an eyebrow at it too, but I doubt his contribution
| was entirely "management of resources".
|
| I think one must also give him the credit for the vision, risk
| taking and drive to apply the resources at his disposal, and
| RL, to these particular problems.
|
| Without that push this research would never have been done, but
| there may have been many fungible people willing to iron out
| the details (and, to be fair, contribute some important ideas
| along the way).
|
| I'm not a proponent of the "great man" theory of history, but
| based on the above I can see that this could be fair (although
| I have no way of telling if internally this is actually how it
| played out).
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Agree. Hassabis is more than a manager. He did start DeepMind
| with just a few people and was a big part of the brains
| behind it.
|
| Now that it has grown he might be doing more management. But
| the groundwork that went into AlphaFold was built on all the
| earlier Alphaxxx things they have built, and he contributed.
|
| It isn't like other big tech managers that just got some new
| thing dumped in their lap. He did start off building this.
| nsoonhui wrote:
| So can we expect that Sam Altman will be honored with Nobel
| prize 2025? After all physics prize went to AI researchers this
| year, and chemistry prize went to an organizational head.
| patall wrote:
| He may still win literature this year.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| I can only predict a more prestigious prize on the horizon
| in the future.
|
| Isn't sama on track to end up with more financial resources
| than Nobel had at his disposal?
|
| Plus I think he's got enough of a philanthropic streak
| which can prove to be not so shabby.
|
| There could very well be a foundation someday awarding the
| Altman Prize well into the 22nd century.
|
| Whether or not his most dynamic legacy would be something
| as simultaneously useful/dangerous as dynamite.
| patall wrote:
| Hassabis should also be a billionaire by now.
| jsnell wrote:
| The Nobel prize's prestige comes from its history, not
| from the size of the monetary award.
|
| For an example, the Millennium Technology Prize is
| awarded every two years and the prize money is slightly
| higher than the Nobel prize (1M EUR vs 0.94M EUR). The
| achievements it's been awarded for tend to be much more
| practical, immediate and understandable than the Nobel
| prize achievements. The next one should be awarded in a
| couple of weeks.
|
| And when that happens, it'll get 1/10th the publicity a
| Nobel prize gets, because the Nobel prize is older than
| any living human and has been accumulating prestige all
| that time, while the Millennium prize is only 20 years
| old.
| pyb wrote:
| He's up for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
|
| https://x.com/S_OhEigeartaigh/status/1843979139948355893
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| You're really conflating things. Altman is no Hassabis.
|
| Just because there is a ton of hype from OpenAI doesn't
| detract from what DeepMind has done. AlphaGo anybody?
|
| Are we really already forgetting what a monumental problem
| protein folding was, decades of research, and AlphaFold came
| in and revolutionized it overnight.
|
| We are pretty jaded these days when miracles are happening
| all the time and people are like "yeah, but he's just a
| manager 'now', what have they done for me in the last few
| days".
| authorfly wrote:
| I am missing context here and would love to know more.
|
| Say I know about ATP Synthase and how the
| proteins/molecules involved there interact to make a sort
| of motor.
|
| How does AlphaFold help us understand that or more
| complicated systems?
|
| Are proteins quite often dispersed and unique, finding each
| other to interact with? Or like ATP Synthase are they more
| of a specific blueprint which tends to arrange in the same
| way but in different forms?
|
| In other words:
|
| Situation 1) Are there many ATP synthase type situations we
| find too complex to understand - regular patterns and
| regular co-occurences of proteins but we don't understand
| them?
|
| Situation 2) Or is most of the use of Protein situational
| and one-off? We see proteins only once or twice, very
| complicated ones, yet they do useful things?
|
| I struggle to situate the problem of Unknown proteins
| without knowing which of the above two is true (and why?)
| dist-epoch wrote:
| > These AI demonstrations require so many GPUs, specialized
| hardware and data that nobody has but the biggest players.
| Moreover, they are engineering work, not really scientistic
|
| So is the Large Hadron Collider.
| alkonaut wrote:
| > The AlphaFold paper has countless authors, many researchers
| and company resources underlying it. Hassabis' contribution is
| management of resources and entrepreneurship, not the actual
| science.
|
| That's usually how you get a Nobel prize in science. You become
| an accomplished scientist, and eventually you lead a big
| lab/department/project and with a massive massiv you work on
| projects where there are big discoveries. These discoveries
| aren't possible to attribute to individuals. If you look back
| through history and try to find how many "Boss professor
| leading massive team/project" vs. how many "Einstein type
| making big discovery in their own head" I think you'll find
| that the former is _a lot_ more common.
|
| > This will incentivize scientists to focus on management of
| other researchers who will manage other researchers who will
| produce the technical inventions.
|
| I don't think the Nobel prize is a large driver of science.
| It's a celebration and a way to put a spotlight on something
| and someone. But I doubt many people choose careers or projects
| based on "this might get us the prize..."
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > You become an accomplished scientist, and eventually you
| lead a big lab/department/project and with a massive massiv
| you work on projects where there are big discoveries.
|
| That's a very recent thing. Up to the 90s, the Nobel
| committee refused to even recognize it. They just started to
| award those prizes at the 21 century, and on most fields they
| never became the majority.
| lr1970 wrote:
| How come they missed Justin Gilmer? He did most of the original
| work [0].
|
| [0]
| https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
|
| EDIT: typos
| DevX101 wrote:
| Here's a direct quote from the Alphafold paper:
|
| "These authors contributed equally: John Jumper, Richard Evans,
| Alexander Pritzel, Tim Green, Michael Figurnov, Olaf Ronneberger,
| Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Russ Bates, Augustin Zidek, Anna
| Potapenko, Alex Bridgland, Clemens Meyer, Simon A. A. Kohl,
| Andrew J. Ballard, Andrew Cowie, Bernardino Romera-Paredes,
| Stanislav Nikolov, Rishub Jain, Demis Hassabis"
| seydor wrote:
| They didnt give the award to the paper
| onursurme wrote:
| The paper represents the work which lead to the prize.
|
| if A=B and A=C, then A=C
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| > if A=B and A=C, then A=C
|
| Technically true, but you might still want to double check
| your logic.
| fastball wrote:
| Not all of the work. For example, it doesn't account for
| the fact that Demis Hassabis, as head of DeepMind,
| undoubtedly recruited many of the co-authors to participate
| in this effort, which is worth something when it comes to
| the final output.
| onursurme wrote:
| To recruit isn't scientific work.
| fastball wrote:
| I didn't realize the Nobel specified that the only work
| which mattered was that of the "scientific" variety.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| What will the paper do with the prize money?
| Rochus wrote:
| At least they could have read it before awarding the price.
| t_mann wrote:
| Here's 8 densely printed pages of contributors to a discovery
| that lead to a Nobel prize:
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.7214#page=26
|
| Guess how many of them were included in the prize. It's a shame
| that the Nobel committee shies away from awarding it to
| institutions, but the AlphaFold prize doesn't even make the top
| 10 in a list of most controversial omissions from a Nobel
| prize. It's a simple case of lab director gets the most credit.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Perhaps it's time the prize goes to the discovery itself
| instead of a person.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| How do you give $1M to a discovery?
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| $1M ain't what it used to be.
| ascorbic wrote:
| It's not a case of shying away from it: the rules of the
| prize don't allow it.
| myworkinisgood wrote:
| rules of the prize can be changed.
| afthonos wrote:
| Can they? I mean, in the sense that you can yolo
| anything, sure, but the prizes were designed in a time
| when it was (more) reasonable to award them to
| individuals, and they are defined in a will. There may
| not be a mechanism for updating the standards.
| hyperbrainer wrote:
| Yes, they can. In 1901, science was not nearly as
| collaborative as it is today. Especially considering the
| need for a Nobel Prize to be experimental and the fact
| that most major labs today _need_ dozens of people.
| afthonos wrote:
| That...has nothing to do with my question. It was a
| procedural and legal question, not an abstract moral one.
| hyperbrainer wrote:
| Well, it seems like amendments have been made before. [0]
| > Before the board ... votes on a proposal to amend the
| statutes ... with the first paragraph, the prize-awarding
| bodies shall examine the proposal.
|
| https://www.nobelprize.org/organization/special-
| regulations-...
| achierius wrote:
| He asked _can_ not _should_: what is the legal mechanism
| for doing so? Personally I don't doubt there is one but I
| don't think you know it off the top of your head, so I
| don't see it as fair to disparage OP for not knowing
| either.
| hyperbrainer wrote:
| Well, it seems like amendments have been made before. [0]
| > Before the board ... votes on a proposal to amend the
| statutes ... with the first paragraph, the prize-awarding
| bodies shall examine the proposal.
|
| https://www.nobelprize.org/organization/special-
| regulations-...
| stenl wrote:
| And further down: " Contributions
|
| J.J. and D.H. led the research. J.J., R.E., A. Pritzel, M.F.,
| O.R., R.B., A. Potapenko, S.A.A.K., B.R.-P., J.A., M.P., T.
| Berghammer and O.V. developed the neural network architecture
| and training. T.G., A.Z., K.T., R.B., A.B., R.E., A.J.B., A.C.,
| S.N., R.J., D.R., M.Z. and S.B. developed the data, analytics
| and inference systems. D.H., K.K., P.K., C.M. and E.C. managed
| the research. T.G. led the technical platform. P.K., A.W.S.,
| K.K., O.V., D.S., S.P. and T. Back contributed technical advice
| and ideas. M.S. created the BFD genomics database and provided
| technical assistance on HHBlits. D.H., R.E., A.W.S. and K.K.
| conceived the AlphaFold project. J.J., R.E. and A.W.S.
| conceived the end-to-end approach. J.J., A. Pritzel, O.R., A.
| Potapenko, R.E., M.F., T.G., K.T., C.M. and D.H. wrote the
| paper."
| onursurme wrote:
| These people aren't in the "These authors contributed
| equally" list.
| stephencanon wrote:
| > J.J. and D.H. led the research
|
| Hey, I wonder who these mysterious "J.J." and "D.H." might
| be?
| DevX101 wrote:
| The nature of scientific work has changed significantly since
| 1895, when the Nobel Prizes were established. 100 years ago,
| lots of scientific work really were driven forward largely by a
| singular person. That's rarely true today for groundbreaking
| research. I don't know if this means the Nobel needs to change
| or we need a another prize that reflects the collaborative work
| of modern science.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > The nature of scientific work has changed significantly
| since 1895, when the Nobel Prizes were established. 100 years
| ago, lots of scientific work really were driven forward
| largely by a singular person. That's rarely true today for
| groundbreaking research.
|
| The question is: is this a necessity for doing good science
| today, or rather an artifact of how important research is
| organized today (i.e. an artifact of the bureacratic and
| organizational structure that you have to "accept"/"tolerate"
| if you want to do want to have a career in science)?
| DevX101 wrote:
| So I did a mini research project on Claude to answer your
| question. From 1900-1930, 87% of Nobel Prizes in Physics,
| Chemistry and Physiology/Medicine were awarded to
| individual contributions, 13% were awarded to collaborative
| contributions.
|
| This ratio has flipped in the past 30 years, from
| 1994-2023, where 17% prizes were individual, 83%
| collaborative.
|
| So I'd say yes, collaborative work is increasingly a
| requirement to do groundbreaking research today. The
| organizational structures and funding are a part of the
| reason as you mention. But it's also that modern scientific
| problems are more complex. I used to have a professor that
| used to say about biology "the easy problems have been
| solved". While I think that's dismissive to some of the
| ingenious experiments done in the past, there's some truth
| to it.
| afthonos wrote:
| This begs the question. If all science is now structured
| as big research teams, we'd expect the breakthroughs to
| come from such teams. That doesn't _necessarily_ imply
| that teams are needed.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| Your argument is exactly a central part of the point that
| I raised.
| seydor wrote:
| ... and the Nobel in Economics goes to OpenAI for innovations in
| nonprofit business structures.
|
| it's the year of AI (ChatGPT preparing its acceptance speech)
| KasianFranks wrote:
| And, at the heart of AlphaFold2 is the language model, the tip of
| the spear in AI today. 'Language' can come in many forms e.g. a
| protein or amino acid sequence.
| ddalex wrote:
| Alpha* is not LLM-based, it's Q-learning based
| jebarker wrote:
| AlphaFold 2 wasn't Q-learning based. It was supervised SGD
| and the "evoformer" they introduced is very close to a
| transformer. So it's not exactly an LLM, but it's a pretty
| close equivalent for protein data.
| haunter wrote:
| inb4 Nobel Peace Prize will go to Timnit Gebru
| belter wrote:
| First Obama got the Peace Prize Nobel, now Demis Hassabis gets
| the Chemistry Nobel. I expect at a minimum the Nobel Prize in
| Literature to be Donald E. Knuth.
| mihaaly wrote:
| The Nobel Prize in Literature should go to Jeff Bezos for the
| Amazon Kindle, obviously!
| belter wrote:
| Yeah, as the Head of the Engineering Org...Makes sense.
| boxed wrote:
| I think a more fitting example would be to give the Literature
| Prize to my son, aged 8.
| Rochus wrote:
| The Nobel Committee is not unaffected by the global decline in
| IQ.
| onursurme wrote:
| Combine this with the Physics prize, I now have hope to receive a
| Nobel prize in any area. Seriously, from now on, I won't mention
| Nobel prizes anywhere anymore.
| balazstorok wrote:
| Nobel peace prize has countless times been awarded to a group of
| people or institution. It is differently controlled but the idea
| is not unprecedented.
| ascorbic wrote:
| The rules are different
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Nobel committee is all in on the AI hype this year!
| thatsadude wrote:
| Well more deserving than the author of Restricted Boltzmann
| machine.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| Demis Hasabis has a really interesting and unusual CV for a nobel
| laureate [1], he started his career in AI game programming (he
| worked e.g. on Popoulous II, Syndicate, Theme Park for Bullfrog,
| and later for Lionhead Studios on Black & White) before doing a
| PhD in neuroscience, becoming an entrepreneur and starting
| DeepMind. I would say this is a refreshing and highly uncommon
| pick for a nobel prize, really cool to see that you don't have to
| be a university professor anymore to do this kind of impactful
| research.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis
| seydor wrote:
| doesn't beat that patent clerk guy
| singularity2001 wrote:
| whose father was one of the leading local industrialists
|
| (installing the first electric lighting for the 1885 Munich
| Oktoberfest)
| nextworddev wrote:
| It's fascinating how the affluent backgrounds of many
| famous scientists and entrepreneurs are downplayed. Eg
| Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, etc
| xdavidliu wrote:
| Bill Gates, but (according to the Isaacson book) not Elon
| Musk
| concordDance wrote:
| I'm now curious which of Gates, Musk and Bezos families
| were wealthier when they started their respective
| careers...
|
| I suspect Bezos, then Gates, then Musk, but it could be
| any order.
| throw310822 wrote:
| I would be very happy to be able to multiply my
| parents'/family's money by whatever factor Bezos, Gates
| or Musk have multiplied theirs.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| The multiplier would be significantly different.
|
| Think the Wright Brothers first aeroplane vs a rocket
| ship.
| daedrdev wrote:
| There were at least hundreds of thousands if not millions
| who had easier starts them Jeff Besos.
| DevX101 wrote:
| If you gave the $300,000 Bezos got from his father to
| 10,000 random Americans in 1994, none of them would have
| created a company the equivalent of Amazon's scale.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| How many of those 10k would have the same background? We
| can pretend Bezos' dad raised him in a "normal" middle
| class background then randomly dropped 300K on him, or we
| can acknowledge he is the business equivalent of an
| Olympic athlete.
| varelse wrote:
| Bezos? Abandoned by his dad who was literally an
| alcoholic clown and raised by his mom and her 2nd husband
| Bezos?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Jorgensen
|
| So $300K in 1994 is about $640K. That's nice but about
| 80th percentile of net worth. It's nice his parents
| believed in him. How many of your parents would do that
| for you? I'm sure at 1 in 5 of them have that kind of
| money because of the distribution here. So the difference
| here is He was smart, he got lucky, and your parents
| don't believe in you enough on this front.
|
| But compare and contrast Bezos and Musk. Bezos's mid-life
| crisis is leaving his wife to run around on his yacht
| banging models. Musk's mid-life crisis is trying to
| destroy democracy so he and his mom won't have to pay US
| taxes. Neither one is a role model, but I don't even get
| the point of the latter.
|
| Which brings us back to AlphaFold. The AlphaFold team did
| something amazing. But also, they had a backer that
| believed in them. David Baker, for better or worse,
| didn't achieve what they did and he'd been at it for
| decades. It's amazing what good backing can achieve.
| itishappy wrote:
| I assumed the parent post was talking about his adopted
| father. The man who raised and dropped $250k on Bezos was
| Miguel.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Bezos
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Miguel worked at Exxon for 32 years as an engineer and a
| manager. It's not like he was the CEO or anything close
| to that. There would literally be hundreds of thousands
| of people in a similar position to him across the world.
|
| Also worth noting that Jeff Bezos was(and I think still
| is) the youngest person who ever became a senior VP at DE
| Shaw. That is a position earned by merit alone.
| adastra22 wrote:
| I think you are agreeing with the poster you are
| responding to, right? Bezos is the equivalent of an
| Olympic athlete: a combination of innate talent as well
| as opportunity.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 10k _random_ Americans, sure.
|
| 10k random Americans with backgrounds in software and a
| business idea? Not so clear.
|
| You also seem very certain that Amazon's scale is a good
| thing, overall, which I remain unconvinced of.
| huijzer wrote:
| > You also seem very certain that Amazon's scale is a
| good thing, overall, which I remain unconvinced of.
|
| What do you find unconvincing about roughly 30 billion in
| net income and free cashflow in 2023?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| That's one metric, that only reflects Amazon's function
| as an income generator.
|
| I view businesses through other metrics as well,
| including their impact on society in a variety of
| different ways. From some of those perspectives, it is
| not clear to me that Amazon (where I was the 2nd
| employee) is a net benefit.
| concordDance wrote:
| This Amazon the company specifically or online shopping
| in general? E.g. if Amazon hadn't been made and some
| other online retailer had dominated (or even if there had
| been many!)
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Both.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| That may be true, but I don't think that's really the
| crux of the argument. This article talks about how Amazon
| was initially funded by Bezos' family members:
| https://luxurylaunches.com/celebrities/jeff-bezos-
| parents-in.... The bigger point is that relatively _very_
| few parents (like a couple percent maybe?) would be in a
| position to give their kid $250k to start a new venture,
| and it 's not that surprising that the most financially
| successful people in the world needed both: intrinsic
| talent and drive, and a huge amount of support from their
| birth circumstances.
|
| The way I like to put it is that both of the following
| are true:
|
| 1. Bezos is uniquely talented and driven, and his success
| depended on that
|
| 2. Bezos' success also depended on him having an uncommon
| level of access to capital at a young age.
|
| The reason I like to say "both of these are true" is that
| so often today I see "sides" that try to argue that only
| one is true, e.g. libertarian-leaning folks (especially
| in the US) arguing that everything is a pure meritocracy,
| and on the other side that these phenomenally successful
| people just inherited their situation (e.g. "Elon Musk is
| only successful because his dad owned an emerald mine")
| chongli wrote:
| Because having some degree of runway is almost always
| necessary but never sufficient. Thousands of Americans
| receive similar amounts of money from their parents in
| the form of inheritance of the family home and other
| major assets. Only one took windfall of that size and
| created Amazon.
| concordDance wrote:
| The "necessary, but not sufficient" is unintuitive to
| most people. Billionaires who come from working class
| families are almost unheard of, but probably more than
| half the self made (for a definition, something like
| multiplied familial investments by at least 100x maybe?)
| billionaires come from upper middle class families.
|
| I wonder if they are actually more likely to come from
| upper middle class (where parents are highly paid
| professionals) than the proper idle rich or even CEOs and
| company founders...
| timmg wrote:
| There's another side to this: if you accept the idea of
| "nature" -- genes capable of carrying "talent" (in some
| sense) -- it should be common for children of talented
| people to be talented.
|
| Of course, talent doesn't always mean prosperity. But in
| a society modeled on meritocracy, it often will.
| km155 wrote:
| hypothesis : it's not per se affluence. it's the culture
| of the family and social circle. A dollop of $ to have
| some free time and maybe buy some books would help and
| might be necessary.
|
| imagine a family where youngster is encouraged to work on
| intellectual problems. where you aren't made fun of for
| touching nerdy things. or for doing puzzles. where the
| social circle endorses learning. these things more
| important than $ in a first world economy. (if third
| world, yes give me some money please for a book or even
| just food. and hopefully with time, an internet connected
| device then the cream will rise they can just watch
| feynman on YouTube...)
|
| that said, it's "better" than it used to be. hundreds of
| years ago most interesting science, etc. was done by the
| royal class. not because they are smarter (I assume). But
| they had free time. And, social encouragement perhaps
| too.
|
| bill gates and zuck dropped out of Harvard right? it's
| not per se Harvard, at least not the graduating bit?
| being surrounded by other smart people is helpful -- and
| or people who encourage intellectual endeavors.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > hundreds of years ago most interesting science, etc.
| was done by the royal class
|
| Not really true. Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo,
| Mendel, Faraday, Tesla... Not from royals, nor from high
| nobility. Many great scientists were born to merchant
| families, of a level that wasn't even all too rare.
| BeetleB wrote:
| The patent clerk guy was almost done with his PhD when he
| became a patent clerk. Not quite comparable.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Uh. Demis finished his PhD...
| huijzer wrote:
| Are we talking about Einstein? If I remember correctly,
| according to Walter Isaacson, Einstein managed to get so
| many good papers out not despite, but _because_ he was not
| working for an university. It gave him more freedom to
| reject existing ideas. Also the years I can find on
| Wikipedia do not seem to support your claim. He started as
| a clerk in 1903, and had his miracle year and submitted his
| PhD dissertation in 1905.
| BeetleB wrote:
| From what I've read, he explicitly sought a position that
| would give him time to work on his physics ideas. Whether
| he would or not would have achieved the same working for
| a university is merely his opinion. In particular, it was
| _not_ the case that he was working for one, and found it
| to be incompatible with his research vision, and left
| academia to become a patent clerk.
|
| He began his work on the PhD prior to 1903.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Nobody defeats the patent clerk guy. I love to cite this
| article that argues he could credibly have been awarded
| anywhere from 5 to 7 Nobel prizes. https://www.quora.com/How-
| many-Nobel-prizes-should-Einstein-...
| belter wrote:
| The infinite polygons are Nobel worth..
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Yes but he could have been one... He really took to AI and
| reignited the fire that melted the AI winter.
| lchengify wrote:
| Didn't know he worked on Black & White. Black & White was
| really ahead of it's time for 2001, it did a much better job of
| having NPC simulations in groups based on how you played as a
| god.
| medo_baayou wrote:
| don't forget that he was IM 2300 rated chess player at 13 yo
| BeetleB wrote:
| Syndicate - wow. That brings back memories!
|
| I could never get it working on DosBox (some timing issue).
| Haven't tried in over a decade, though. Should see if I can get
| it working.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| I'm always interested in hearing about these people who go and
| get a PhD in an unrelated field to their original studies,
| often years after leaving university and working in an
| industry. Here it says Hasabis did an undergraduate degree in a
| computer science program, and them spent a decade working on
| computer games at studios, and then somehow just rocked up to a
| university and asked to do a PhD in neuroscience.
|
| I feel if I tried to do that in the US- (where I got a masters
| degree in engineering, spent a 15 yrs as an aerospace
| engineer,)- tried to go back and ask to do a PhD in, say,
| Physics - I'd be promptly told to go fuck myself (or, fuck
| myself but then enroll in a new undergrad or maaaybe graduate
| program only after re-taking GRE's. Straight PhD? Never heard
| it work like that.)
| triceratops wrote:
| Aerospace engineering masters -> Physics PhD doesn't sound
| like a big leap to me. I don't think that's accurate.
| shnock wrote:
| I think PhD's are generally different enough in Europe vs the
| US that this might be less surprising upon further research
| biofox wrote:
| I have known a several people who made the jump from Computer
| Science to Biology at graduate school. Usually, it's either
| via genomics or neuroscience (as in Hassabis' case), where
| there is a large need for people who can do data crunching or
| computational modelling.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Why do you think that? It's not my experience. At the grad
| school level they'll take anyone who can do the work and is
| interested. Outside experience, even in unrelated fields, is
| often a plus. Grad students just out of undergrad have no
| idea how the world works.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| That may be more true in a super crowded and hot area, like
| AI now where reputable profs get dozens of PhD applicants per
| position, who all have already published relevant works in
| the field at top venues during their masters.
|
| In more chill fields where the waters are relatively calm,
| this may be less of an issue.
|
| But let's also consider the fact that Hassabis did his
| undergrad at the University of Cambridge, likely with
| excellent results. He wasn't just some random programmer.
| Windchaser wrote:
| I made the jump from mostly-math undergrad to materials
| science PhD (close to chemistry/physics, if you don't know
| the field). I was welcomed with open arms.
|
| If you've got any math-heavy STEM graduate degree, you can
| likely jump into a physics PhD. You might need to take some
| senior-level undergraduate courses to catch up, but the
| transition is quite doable. At some point, your overall
| intelligence, enthusiasm, and work ethic matter more than
| your specific background.
| jltsiren wrote:
| There is a lot of variation in how PhD studies work. In some
| places, you are just a faceless candidate applying to a
| department, which discourages you from contacting the faculty
| before you are admitted. In other places, you must convince a
| professor to supervise and fund you before you are even
| allowed to apply. Some universities require you (or your
| supervisor) pay tuition fees for a number of years before you
| can graduate, while others don't care what you do, as long as
| you can produce a thesis that meets their standards.
|
| You can jump from social sciences to STEM. Your formal
| admission can wait for a year or two after you actually
| started. Or you can move to another university and get a PhD
| in a few months, because the administrative requirements in
| the original one were too unreasonable. These things happen,
| because universities are independent organizations that like
| doing things their own way.
| jerjerjer wrote:
| PhD is a thankless, low paid position with insane hours and
| zero guaranteed return. Outside of a few elite programs and
| universities getting into PhD program is fairly easy - they
| take anyone qualified.
| nanoxide wrote:
| Yep. I distinctly remember reading an interview in the German
| GameStar magazine in '99 or something with him where he talks
| about his early work with Bullfrog. Over the years I read his
| name from time to time as he moved towards research. Pretty
| amazing career.
| mhrmsn wrote:
| Great achievement, although I think it's interesting that this
| Nobel prize was awarded so early, with "the greatest benefit on
| mankind" still outstanding. Are there already any clinically
| approved drugs based on AI out there I might have missed?
|
| In comparison, the one for lithium batteries was awarded in 2019,
| over 30 years after the original research, when probably more
| than half of the world's population already used them on a daily
| basis.
| pm215 wrote:
| Arguably awarding early is more in line with the intention
| expressed in Nobel's will: "to those who, during the preceding
| year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind". It
| seems to have drifted into "who did something decades ago that
| we're now confident enough in the global significance of to
| award a prize". I suspect that if the work the prize recognized
| reslly had to have been carried out in the preceding year the
| recipients would be rather different.
| benrapscallion wrote:
| Shouldn't this be GLP1RAs (semaglutide etc.) for the last
| year?
| cmavvv wrote:
| Given that drugs take around 10 years to get to market, and
| that some time is needed for industrial adoption as well, it's
| not very reasonable to expect clinically approved drugs before
| a few years.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > around 10 years to get to market
|
| This is really sad. A new recipe for feeding honeybees to
| make tastier honey could get to market in perhaps a month or
| two. All the chemical reactions happening in the bees gut and
| all the chemicals in the resulting honey are unknown, yet
| within a matter of weeks its being eaten.
|
| Yet if we find a new way of combining chemicals to cure
| cancer, it takes a decade before most can benefit.
|
| I feel like we don't balance our risks vs rewards well.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| I think the idea is that we're, as a species, much more
| comfortable with the idea that 15 years down the line that
| 50% of treated colonies collapse in a way directly
| attributable to the treatment than we are with the idea
| that 15 years down the line 50% of treated humans die in a
| way directly attributable to the treatment.
|
| Now if the human alternative to treatment is to die anyway
| than i think that balance shifts. I do think we should be
| somewhat liberal with experimental treatments for patients
| in dire need, but you have to also understand that
| experimental treatments can just be really expensive which
| limits either the people who can afford it, or if it's
| given for free, the amount the researcher can
| make/perform/provide.
|
| 10 years is a very long time. I've had close family members
| die of cancer and any opportunity for treatment (read:
| hope) is good in my opinion. But i wouldn't say there's no
| reason that it takes so long
| og_kalu wrote:
| Yesterday's physics win was rather odd but this I have no problem
| with!
|
| Lol does this mean there's a chance the Transformer Authors win a
| Nobel in literature sometime? Certainly seems a lot more
| plausible than before yesterday.
| boxed wrote:
| I think it's still too early to know if AlphaFold is a massively
| overfitted statistical model that will utterly fail on novel
| structures.
| patall wrote:
| The prize winners are ultimately selected by a group of mid-age
| to old professors. And to tell the truth (I work at a research
| institute in Stockholm), some of the old folks seem to have
| huge FOMO. They know that they cannot keep up themselves, they
| have no idea (and no way of finding out) who is actually good
| and who is just pretending, which leads to recruitment of an
| 'interesting' bunch of young group leaders. Some of them are
| surely good, but I know of at least one guy who holds
| presentations as if he invented AlphaFold himself, while having
| contributed one single paper of interest to the field. Large
| turn off for me.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| I dunno, you should have AI FOMO. Or at least start focusing
| on computational thinking.
| patall wrote:
| I do not criticize them for having FOMO. But I have my
| doubts when it is the 60-year-olds that are the most
| enthusiastic about something new (as long as it is not a
| new ABBA album), given the number of grifters out there.
| And there would have been many others that also deserve a
| Nobel, those three could easily have waited another 20
| years. If it really was those that had the highest impact
| the last year who won the prize, it (or rather "Medicine")
| should have gone to GLP-1/Semaglutide research.
| flobosg wrote:
| AlphaFold2 has correctly predicted novel folds:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-022-03357-1
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Calling it, to keep with the theme: the Nobel prize in literature
| will be given to a LLM author.
| ConcernedCoder wrote:
| people still folding@home <shrug>
| cool-RR wrote:
| I wonder why various outlets, including DeepMind's blog, say that
| John Jumper is a "Senior Research Scientist". That's L5 which
| sounds like quite a low rank for a Nobel prize winner. I checked
| his LinkedIn and he's a director, which is around L8. I thought
| that maybe he was L5 during the publishing of the results, but
| no, he was either L6 or L7.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Maybe "Senior Research Scientist" sounds more respectable among
| the intended audience. A research scientist is usually an
| independent researcher rather than someone working in another
| person's team, while "senior" indicates that they have been in
| an independent role for a while. A director, on the other hand,
| is someone who failed to avoid administrative duties, and it
| doesn't imply any degree of seniority.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| L5 doesn't mean anything to anyone outside of whatever
| organization you're talking about (Google?). A Senior Research
| Scientist means "a person who is a scientist, works in
| research, and is very experienced in that role". Even if this
| is not the title he holds in his organization, it is an
| objective title that applies to him.
| atmosx wrote:
| > Oppenheimer was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Physics three
| times[...] pondered why he was never bestowed the honor.
|
| > "To understand this [...] you have to first examine the man's
| academic life before and after the war."
|
| Quote from: https://discover.lanl.gov/news/0609-oppie-nobel-
| prize/
|
| Not anymore. You're not required to know or have studied
| Chemistry to get a Nobel in Chemistry.
| og_kalu wrote:
| The Nobel Prize has always prioritised advances in the field
| over specific training.
|
| Curie was a trained chemist when she won her prize in physics.
| Michelson was a Naval Officer. Of course naturally, being able
| to win a Nobel usually means you studied the field your entire
| life but that has never been a requirement.
| ilaksh wrote:
| For some reason this web page doesn't render properly in my
| browser. The main text overlaps the table of contents.
|
| I'm using Chrome on KDE (Ubuntu) on a 1920 wide display (minus
| the side panel). I checked and I don't have the page zoomed.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/fOOQ3Av.png
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| I think putting AlphaFold here was premature; it might not age
| well. AlphaFold is an impressive achievement but it simply has
| not "cracked the code for protein folding" - about 1/3rd of its
| predictions are too uncertain to be usable, it says nothing about
| dynamics, suffers from the same ML problems of failing on
| uncommon structures, and I was surprised to learn that many of
| its predictions are incorrect because it ignores topological
| constraints[1]. To be clear, these are _constructive_ criticisms
| of AlphaFold in isolation, my grumpiness is directed at the Nobel
| committee. "Cracked the code for protein folding" is simply not
| true; it is an ML approach with high accuracy that suffers the
| same ML limitations of failing to generalize or failing to
| understand deeper principles like R^3 topology that cannot be
| gleaned stochastically.
|
| More significantly: it has yet to be especially impactful in
| biochemistry research, nor has its results really been carefully
| audited. Maybe it will turn out to deserve the prize. But the
| committee needed to wait. I am concerned that they got spun by
| Google's PR campaign - or, considering yesterday's prize, Big
| Tech PR in general.
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10672856/
| InkCanon wrote:
| I think looking back five years from now, this will be viewed
| as another Kissinger/Obama but wrt STEM. Given far too
| prematurely under pressure to keep up with the Joneses/chase
| the hype.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| I am not so confident or dismissive: the real problem is that
| testing millions of predictions (or any fairly bold
| scientific development like AlphaFols) takes time, and that
| time simply has not elapsed. Some of the criticisms I
| identified might be low-hanging fruit that in 5 years will be
| seen as minor corrections - but we're still discovering the
| things that need to be corrected. It is concerning that the
| prize announcement itself is either grossly overstated:
| With its help, they have been able to predict the structure
| of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers
| have identified [the word 'virtually' is stretched into
| meaninglessness]
|
| or vague, could have been done with other tools, and hardly
| Nobel-worthy: Among a myriad of scientific
| applications, researchers can now better understand
| antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can
| decompose plastic.
|
| I am seriously wondering if they took Google / DeepMind press
| releases at face value.
| InkCanon wrote:
| I have the same views as you (although admittedly the
| Kissinger comparison didn't convey that, because we all
| know how that turned out). It's at best quite premature. At
| worst, should never have been given in hindsight. Will
| probably land somewhere in between.
|
| Second point is spot on. I really, really hope they didn't
| just fall for what is frankly a bit of SV style press
| release meant to hype things. Similar work was done on
| crystal structures with some massive number reported. It's
| a vastly other thing than the implied meaning that they are
| now fully understood and able to be used in some way.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Chew on this a little, I stripped out as much as possible,
| but I imagine it still will feel reflexively easy to
| dismiss. Partially because its hard to hear criticism, at
| least for me. Partially because a lot was stripped out: a
| lot has gone sideways to get us to this point, so this may
| sound minor.
|
| The fact you have to reach for "I [wonder if the votes were
| based on] Google / DeepMind press releases [taken] at face
| value." should be a red blaring alarm.
|
| It creates a new premise[1] that enables continued
| permission to seek confirmation bias.
|
| I was once told you should check your premises when facing
| an unexpected conclusion, and to do that before creating
| new ones. I strive to.
|
| [1] All Nobel Prize voters choose their support based on
| reading a press release at face value
| matsemann wrote:
| Original intent of the prizes is, however, to reward those
| that recently contributed good. Not to be a lifetime award
| after seeing how things pan out.
| InkCanon wrote:
| Yes, but the good has to be extraordinary. If there's logic
| to it, in these cases they are predicting the good will
| come much later. Which is an incredibly difficult
| prediction to make.
| j7ake wrote:
| I would say alphafold is to structure prediction as crispr is
| to gene editing.
|
| Crispr did not solve gene editing either, but has been made
| accessible to the broad biochemistry and biology researchers to
| use.
|
| Both similar impact and changed the field significantly.
| beanjuice wrote:
| Entire fields are based upon the existence of crispr now, it
| demonstrated its impact. It has been 2? 3? years, people who
| were making papers anyway have implemented AlphaFold, it
| hasn't exactly spawned a new area.
| sega_sai wrote:
| Physics prize one goes to AI, chemistry too. What next? Nobel in
| Literature goes to ChatGPT?
|
| Jokes aside, I think the chemistry prize seems to make a bit more
| sense to me than physics one.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| I think it is definitely possible for ChatGPT to win the Nobel
| Prize in Literature.. maybe not this version or the next but
| eventually -- especially if it is by proxy aka as is the
| premise in "The Wife" (a good book/movie btw).
|
| There's already precedent for anonymous creators, aka Banksy.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| Anyone else think that giving a nobel prize to the CEO of the
| company is absurd?
| eig wrote:
| I think I disagree with most of the comments here stating it's
| premature to give the Nobel to AlphaFold.
|
| I'm in biotech academia and it has changed things already. Yes
| the protein folding problem isn't "solved" but no problem in
| biology ever is. Comparing to previous bio/chem Nobel winners
| like Crispr, touch receptors, quantum dots, click chemistry, I do
| think AlphaFold already has reached sufficient level of impact.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| >> I do think AlphaFold already has reached sufficient level
| of impact.
|
| how so?
| cmavvv wrote:
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2315002121
| eig wrote:
| Well I'm sure one could look at number of published papers
| etc, but that metric is a lot to do with hype and I see it as
| a lagging indicator.
|
| A better one is seeing my grad-school friends with zero
| background in comp-sci or math, presenting their cell-biology
| results with AlphaFold in conferences and at lab meetings.
| They are not protein folding people either- just molecular
| biologists trying to present more evidence of docking
| partners, functional groups in their pathway of interest.
|
| It reminds me of when Crispr came out. There were ways to
| edit DNA before Crispr, but its was tough to do right and
| required specialized knowledge. After Crispr came out, even
| non-specialists like me in tangential fields could get
| started.
| tananan wrote:
| In both academic and industrial settings, I've seen an
| initial spark of hope about AlphaFold's utility being
| replaced with a resignation that it's cool, but not really
| useful. Yet in both settings it continued as a playing card
| for generating interest.
|
| There's an on-point blog-post "AI and Biology"
| (https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ai-and-biology)
| which illustrates why AlphaFold's real breakthrough is not
| super actionable for creating further bio-medicinal
| applications in a similar vein.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| That article explains why AI might not work so well
| further down the line biology discoveries, but I still
| think alphafold can really help with the development of
| small molecule therapies that bind to particular known
| targets and not to others, etc.
| tananan wrote:
| The thing with available ligand + protein recorded
| structures is that they are much, much more sparse than
| available protein structures themselves (which are
| already kinda sparse, but good enough to allow
| AlphaFold). Some of the commonly-used datasets for
| benchmarking structure-based affinity models are so
| biased you can get a decent AUC by only looking at the
| target or ligand in isolation (lol).
|
| Docking ligands doesn't make for particularly great
| structures, and snapshot structures really miss out on
| the important dynamics.
|
| So it's hard for me to imagine how alphafold can help
| with small molecule development (alphafold2 doesn't even
| know what small molecules are). I agree it totally sounds
| plausible in principle, I've been in a team where such an
| idea was pushed before it flopped, but in practice I feel
| there's much less use to extract from there than one
| might think.
|
| EDIT: To not be so purely negative: I'm sure real use can
| be found in tinkering with AlphaFold. But I really don't
| think it has or will become a big deal in small drug
| discovery workflows. My PoV is at least somewhat educated
| on the matter, but of course it does not reflect the
| breadth of what people are doing out there.
| adastra22 wrote:
| But Crispr actually edited genes. How much of this
| theoretical work was real, and how much was slop? Did the
| grad students actually achieve confirmation of their
| conformational predictions?
| eig wrote:
| Surprisingly, yes the predicted structures from AlphaFold
| had functional groups that fit with experimental data of
| binding partners and homologues. While I don't know
| whether it matched with the actual crystallization, it
| did match with those orthogonal experiments (these were
| cell biology, genetics, and molecular biology labs, not
| protein structure labs, so they didn't try to actually
| crystalize the proteins themselves).
| fedeb95 wrote:
| what has changed? I think people need more from a comment than
| blind trust.
| dekhn wrote:
| It solidly answered the question: "Is evolutionary sequence
| relationship and structure data sufficient to predict a large
| fraction of the structures that proteins adopt". the answer,
| surprising few, is that the data we have indeed can be used
| to make general predictions (even outside of the training
| classes), and also surprising many, that we can do so with a
| minimum of evolutionary sequence data.
|
| That people are arguing about the finer details of what it
| gets wrong is support for its value, not a detriment.
| timr wrote:
| That's a bit like saying that the invention of the airplane
| proved that animals can fly, when birds are swooping around
| your head.
|
| I mean, sure, prior to alphafold, the notion that sequence
| / structure relationship was "sufficient to predict"
| protein structure was merely a very confident theory that
| was used to regularly make the most reliable kind of
| structure predictions via homology modeling (it was also
| core to Rosetta, of course).
|
| Now it is a very confident theory that is used to make a
| slightly larger subset of predictions via a totally
| different method, but still fails at the ones we don't know
| about. Vive la change!
| dekhn wrote:
| I think an important detail here is that Rosetta did
| something beyond traditional homology models- it
| basically shrank the size of the alignments to small (n=7
| or so?) sequences and used just tiny fragments from the
| PDB, assembled together with other fragments. That's sort
| of fundamentally distinct from homology modelling which
| tends to focus on much larger sequences.
| flobosg wrote:
| > and used just tiny fragments from the PDB
|
| 3-mers and 9-mers, if I recall correctly. The fragment-
| based approach helped immensely with cutting down the
| conformational search space. The secondary structure of
| those fragments was enough to make educated guesses of
| the protein backbone's, at a time where _ab initio_ force
| field predictions struggled with it.
| timr wrote:
| Yes, Rosetta did monte carlo substitution of 9-mers,
| followed by a refinement phase with 3-mers. Plus a bunch
| of other stuff to generate more specific backbone "moves"
| in weird circumstances.
|
| In order to _create those fragment libraries_ , there was
| a step involving generation of multiple-sequence
| alignments, pruning the alignments, etc. Rosetta used
| sequence homology to generate structure. This wasn't a
| wild, untested theory.
| flobosg wrote:
| > Rosetta used sequence homology
|
| Rosetta used _remote_ sequence homology to generate the
| MSAs and find template fragments, which at the time was
| innovative. A similar strategy is employed for
| AlphaFold's MSAs containing the evolutionary couplings.
| dekhn wrote:
| I don't know that I agree that fragment libraries use
| sequence homology. From my understanding of it, homology
| implies an actual evolutionary relationship. Wheras
| fragment libraries instead are agnostic and instead seem
| to be based on the idea that short fragments of non-
| related proteins can match up in sequence and structure
| space. Nobody looks at 3-mers and 9-mers in homology
| modelling; it's typically well over 25 amino acids long,
| and there is usually a plausible whole-domain (in the
| SCOP terminology).
|
| But, the protein field has always played loose with the
| term "homology".
| mhrmsn wrote:
| Crispr is widely used and there are even therapies approved
| based on it, you can actually buy TVs that use quantum dots and
| click chemistry has lots of applications (bioconjugation etc.),
| but I don't think we have seen that impact from AlphaFold yet.
|
| There's a lot of pharma companies and drug design startups that
| are actively trying to apply these methods, but I think the
| jury is still out for the impact it will finally have.
| nextos wrote:
| AlphaFold is excellent engineering, but I struggle calling
| this a breakthrough in science. Take T cell receptor (TCR)
| proteins, which are produced pseudo-randomly by somatic
| recombination, yielding an enormous diversity. AlphaFold's
| predictions for those are not useful. A breakthrough in
| folding would have produced rules that are universal. What
| was produced instead is a really good regressor in the space
| of proteins where some known training examples are closeby.
|
| If I was the Nobel Committee, I would have waited a bit to
| see if this issue aged well. Also, in terms of giving credit,
| I think those who invented pairwise and multiple alignment
| dynamic programming algorithms deserved some recognition.
| AlphaFold built on top of those. They are the cornerstone of
| the entire field of biological sequence analysis.
| Interestingly, ESM was trained on raw sequences, not on
| multiple alignments. And while it performed worse, it
| generalizes better to unseen proteins like TCRs.
| flobosg wrote:
| > A breakthrough in folding would have produced folding
| rules that are universal.
|
| Protein folding [?] protein structure prediction
|
| > I think those who invented pairwise and multiple
| alignment dynamic programming algorithms deserved some
| recognition
|
| I would add BLAST as well but that ship has sailed, I'm
| afraid.
| dekhn wrote:
| The value in BLAST wasn't in its (very fast) alignment
| implementation but in the scoring function, which
| produced calibrated E-values that could be used directly
| to decide whether matches were significant or not. As a
| postdoc I did an extremely careful comparison of E-values
| to true, known similarities, and the E-values were spot
| on. Apparently, NIH ran a ton of evolution simulations to
| calibrate those parameters.
|
| For the curious, BLAST is very much like pairwise
| alignment but uses an index to speed up by avoiding
| attempting to align poorly scoring regions.
| nextos wrote:
| BLAST estimates are derived from extreme value theory and
| large deviations, which is a very elegant area of
| probability and statistics.
|
| That's the key part, I think, being able to estimate how
| unique each alignment is without having to simulate the
| null distribution, as it was done before with FASTA.
|
| The index also helps, but the speedup comes mostly from
| the other part.
| j7ake wrote:
| If blast used a neural network it may have had a chance!
|
| The question is: has blast made more of an impact than
| alpha fold? I think so at the moment.
| causal wrote:
| I agree. For those not in biotech, protein folding has been the
| holy grail for a long time, and AlphaFold represents a huge
| leap forward. Not unlike trying to find a way to reduce NP to P
| in CS. A leap forward there would be huge, even if it came
| short of a complete solution.
| flobosg wrote:
| > Let me get the most important question out of the way: is
| AlphaFold's advance really significant, or is it more of the
| same? I would characterize their advance as roughly two CASPs
| in one
|
| --https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-
| casp...
| divbzero wrote:
| I agree that it's not premature, for two reasons: First, it's
| been 6 years since AlphaFold first won CASP in 2018. This is
| not far from the 8 years it took from CRISPR's first paper in
| 2012 to its Nobel Prize in 2020. Second, AlphaFold is only half
| the prize. The other half is awarded for David Baker's work
| since the 1990s on Rosetta and RoseTTAFold.
| pama wrote:
| Agreed. There are too many different directions of impact to
| point out explicitly, so I'll give a short vignette on one of
| the most immediate impacts, which was the use in protein
| crystallography. Many aspiring crystallographers correctly
| reorganized their careers following AlphaFold2, and everyone
| else started using it for molecular replacement as a way to
| solve the phase problem in crystallography; the models from AF2
| allowed people to resolve new crystal structures from data
| measured years prior to the AF2 release.
| flobosg wrote:
| Same with Rosetta, and even Foldit[1]! -
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nsmb.2119
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit
| roughly wrote:
| It also proved that deep learning models are a valid approach
| to bioinformatics - for all its flaws and shortcomings,
| AlphaFold solves arbitrary protein structure in minutes on
| commodity hardware, whereas previous approaches were, well,
| this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home
|
| A gap between biological research and biological engineering is
| that, for bioengineering, the size of the potential solution
| space and the time and resources required to narrow it down are
| fundamental drivers of the cost of creating products - it turns
| out that getting a shitty answer quickly and cheaply is worth
| more than getting the right answer slowly.
| flobosg wrote:
| AlphaFold and Folding@home attempt to solve related, but
| essentially different, problems. As I already mentioned here,
| protein structure prediction is not fully equivalent to
| protein folding.
| roughly wrote:
| Yeah, this is what I mean by "a shitty answer fast" -
| structure prediction isn't a canonical answer, but it's a
| good enough approximation for good enough decision-making
| to make a bunch of stuff viable that wouldn't be otherwise.
|
| I agree with you, though - they're two different answers.
| I've done a bunch of work in the metagenomics space, and
| you very quickly get outside areas where Alphafold can
| really help, because nothing you're dealing with is similar
| enough to already-characterized proteins for the algorithm
| to really have enough to draw on. At that point, an actual
| solution for protein folding that doesn't require a
| supercomputer would make a difference.
| flobosg wrote:
| > this is what I mean by "a shitty answer fast" -
| structure prediction isn't a canonical answer
|
| A proper protein structural model is an all-atom
| representation of the macromolecule at its global minimum
| energy conformation, and the expected end result of the
| folding process; both are equivalent and thus equally
| canonical. The "fast" part, i.e., the decrease in
| computational time comes mostly from the heuristics used
| for conformational space exploration. Structure
| prediction skips most of the folding pathway/energy
| funnel, but ends up at the same point as a completed
| folding simulation.
|
| > At that point, an actual solution for protein folding
| that doesn't require a supercomputer would make a
| difference.
|
| Or more representative sequences and enough variants by
| additional metagenomic surveys, for example. Of course,
| this might not be easily achievable.
| roughly wrote:
| > ends up at the same point as a completed folding
| simulation.
|
| Well, that's the hope, at least.
|
| > Or more representative sequences and enough variants by
| additional metagenomic surveys, for example. Of course,
| this might not be easily achievable.
|
| For sure, but for ostensibly profit-generating
| enterprises, it's pretty much out of the picture.
|
| I think the reason an actual computational solution for
| folding is interesting is that the existing set of
| experimentally verified protein structures are for
| proteins we could isolate and crystalize (which is also
| the training set for AlphaFold, so that's pretty much the
| area its predictions are strongest, and even within that,
| it's only catching certain conformations of the proteins)
| - even if you can get a large set of metagenomic surveys
| and a large sample of protein sequences, the limitations
| on the methods for experimentally verifying the protein
| structure means we're restricted to a certain section of
| the protein landscape. A general purpose computationally
| tractable method for simulating protein folding under
| various conditions could be a solution for those cases
| where we can't actually physically "observe" the
| structure directly.
| dekhn wrote:
| Most proteins don't fold to their global energy minimum-
| they fold to a collection of kinetically accessible
| states. Many proteins fail to reach the global minimum
| because of intermediate barriers from states that are
| easily reached from the unfolded state.
|
| Attempting to predict structures using mechanism that
| simulate the physical folding process waste immense
| amount of energy and time sampling very uninteresting
| areas of space.
|
| You don't want to use a supercomputer to simulate
| folding; it can be done with a large collection of
| embarassingly parallel machines much more cheaply and
| effectively. I proposed a number of approaches on
| supercomputers and was repeatedly told no because the
| codes didn't scale to the full supercomputer, and
| supercomputers are designed and built for codes that
| scale really well on non-embarassingly parallel problems.
| This is the reason I left academia for google- to use
| their idle cycles to simulate folding (and do protein
| design, which also works best using embarassingly
| parallel processing).
|
| As far as I can tell, only extremely small and simple
| proteins (like ribonuclease) fold to somewhere close to
| their global energy minimum.
| adastra22 wrote:
| AlphaFold doesn't work for engineering though. Getting a
| shitty answer ends up being worse than useless.
|
| It seems to really accelerate productivity of researchers
| investigating bio molecules or molecules very similar to
| existing bio molecules. But not de novo stuff.
| roughly wrote:
| Eh, in many cases for actual customer-facing commercial
| work, they're sticking remarkably close to stuff that's in
| genbank/swissprot/etc - well characterized molecules and
| pathways, because working with genuinely de novo stuff is
| difficult and expensive. In those cases, Alphafold works
| fine - it always requires someone to actually look at the
| results and see whether they make sense or not, but also
| "the part of the solution space where the tools work" is
| often a deciding factor in what approach is chosen.
| jltsiren wrote:
| > It also proved that deep learning models are a valid
| approach to bioinformatics
|
| A lot of bioinformatics tools using deep learning appeared
| around 2017-2018. But rather than being big breakthroughs
| like AlphaFold, most of them were just incremental
| improvements to various technical tasks in the middle of a
| pipeline.
| JangoSteve wrote:
| Interestingly, the award was specifically for the impact of
| AlphaFold2 that won CASP 14 in 2020 using their EvoFormer
| architecture evolved from the Transformer, and not for
| AlphaFold that won CASP 13 in 2018 with a collection of ML
| models each separately trained, and which despite winning,
| performed at a much lower level than AlphaFold2 would perform
| two years later.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Looks like science is out, black box prediction is in. It's like
| the era of epicycles all over again.
|
| Oh well. Fellow realists, see you all 1500 years from now!
| pelorat wrote:
| There are things so complex in science that a human mind can
| never understand them, but a large neural network can.
| outworlder wrote:
| For some definition of 'understanding'.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| It was big blind luck that the laws of planetary motion turned
| out to be so simple. There's no reason to think that protein
| folding can similarly be reduced to some elegant description
| without needing large blackbox models.
| ayakang31415 wrote:
| Science is just a methodology to test hypothesis. It does not
| matter how you get the result as long as the result is
| empirically scrutinized.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| To me this is more controversial than Geoffrey Hinton winning it
| for physics.
| ocular-rockular wrote:
| They should've given this prize to Hinton too, for making the
| machine learning of Alphafold possible.
| dekhn wrote:
| I wasn't expecting to see David Baker in the list (just Demis and
| John). But I'm really glad to see it... David is a great guy.
|
| At CASP (the biannual protein structure prediction competition)
| around 2000, I sat down with David and told him that eventually
| machine learning would supplant humans at structure prediction
| (at the time Rosetta was already the leading structure
| prediction/design tool, but was filled with a bunch of ad-hoc
| hand-coded features and optimizers). he chuckled and said he
| doubted it, every time he updated the Rosetta model with newer
| PDB structures, the predictions got worse.
|
| I will say that the Nobel committee needs to stop saying "protein
| folding" when they mean "protein structure prediction".
| jboggan wrote:
| The models and tools designed for the CASP competition were an
| example of running around the solution space at a glacial pace
| and getting stuck in local minima. I can't speak for Rosetta by
| my labmates had fairly successful tools that usually ranked
| right behind Baker's lab, and they were plagued by issues where
| the most successful models had impossible or idiosyncratic
| terms in them.
|
| For example, a very successful folding model had the signs
| reversed on hydrophobic and some electrostatic interactions. It
| made no sense physically but it gave a better prediction than
| competing models, and it was hard to move away from because it
| ranked well in CASP.
| dekhn wrote:
| Which model had the signs reversed?
|
| Yes, CASP was prone to getting stuck in local minima. I think
| the whole structure prediction field had become moribund.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Refreshingly good. Bakers "early" (not really early, but
| earlier than AlphaFold) work (having humans with no background
| solve folds) really laid the groundwork to proving that
| heuristic methods were likely to outperform physical forcefield
| and ab initio/DFT methods for structure prediction. And AI
| structure prediction if nothing else is heuristic protein
| folding.
| siver_john wrote:
| They had to put David Baker on here, his work on protein design
| if nothing else was ground breaking. I've expected him to win
| it at some point in a, it's not a matter of if but of when.
| hanjeanwat wrote:
| excellent longread on the development of AlphaFold - with
| interviews with Baker + Jumper and more:
| https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-ai-revolutionized-protein...
| jboggan wrote:
| Congrats to David Baker and his lab!
| photochemsyn wrote:
| AlphaFold is a useful tool but it's unsatisfying from a physical
| chemistry perspective. It doesn't give much if any insight in to
| the mechanisms of folding, and is of very limited value in
| designing novel proteins with industrial applications, and in
| protein prediction for membrane-spanning proteins, extremophilic
| microbe proteins, etc.
|
| Thus things like folding kinetics of transition states and
| intermediates, remain poorly understood through such statistical
| models, because they do not explicitly incorporate physical laws
| governing the protein system, such as electrostatic interactions,
| solvation effects, or entropy-driven conformational changes.
|
| In particular, environmental effects are neglected - there's no
| modeling of the native solvated environment, where water
| molecules, ions, and temperature directly affect the protein's
| conformational stability. This is critical when it comes to
| designing a novel protein with catalytic activity that's stable
| under conditions like high salt, high temperature etc.
|
| As far as Nobel Prizes, it was already understood in the field
| two decades ago that no single person or small group was going to
| have an Einstein moment and 'solve protein folding', it's just
| too complicated. This award is questionable and the marketing
| effort involved by the relevant actors has been rather misleading
| - for one of the worst examples of this see:
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/one-of-the-bigges...
|
| For a more judicious explanation of why the claim that protein
| folding has been solved isn't really true:
|
| "The power and pitfalls of AlphaFold2 for structure prediction
| beyond rigid globular proteins" (June 2024)
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41589-024-01638-w
| pelorat wrote:
| The mechanisms of folding is most likely impossible for a human
| mind to comprehend.
| bawolff wrote:
| AI is cleaning up at the nobel prizes!
| optimalsolver wrote:
| This is what extreme FOMO looks like.
| muenalan wrote:
| Surely, it is helpful to consider the achievement in terms of the
| contest setup to detect a Nobel-worthy breakthrough:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CASP
|
| It moved the needle so much in terms of baseline capability. Let
| alone Nobel's original request: positive impact to humanity; well
| deserved.
|
| In biology/medicine it is still awed like coming from a different
| planet; tech before was obviously that lacking.
| hilux wrote:
| I'm not always a Lex Fridman fan, but the interview with Demis is
| well worth a listen.
| phtrivier wrote:
| Feeling a bit down today, so just asking: when can we
| realistically expect to see the (positive) effects of this Nobel
| in daily life, and what would they be ? (I understand it's
| helping biotech a lot, but helping them do... what exactly ?)
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| The drug development process takes around 10+ years typically,
| a lot of long planning of multiple phases of studies needs to
| be done. This will help in the initial steps and in finding
| good starting points, and in theory should help the subsequent
| stages be more successful. I wouldn't expect new drugs this
| decade.
|
| Other aspects of biotech and research could well be affected
| far faster than the consumer drug market, but again you'll need
| a few years for those early stage developments to aid real
| world applications.
| kragen wrote:
| Huh, so both the chemistry Nobel and the physics Nobel were for
| neural networks this year. That's astounding.
| ggm wrote:
| As a computer scientist who is oppositional to AGI boom-bubble
| mania, it was easy to decry the Nobel in physics. But,
| contextually given who Murray Gell-Mann was and what field he was
| in (astrophysics) I feel a very strong Gell-Mann Effect here
| because I am happy to accept THIS use of computational systems to
| advance (bio)chemistry is worthy, and I find myself wondering why
| I am so uncritical about it?
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