YOUTUBE

What would you say has been the biggest scientific achievement of this century? The first photograph of a black hole? Gene editing technology? Quantum computing? All solid contenders, but there's a case to be made that the most revolutionary development was actually in a field many of us have never heard of: protein folding. Proteins are fundamental cogs in the machinery of life. But to understand how a protein works, we need to know how it’s folded up. This is incredibly complicated stuff: there are more possible configurations for an average protein than there are atoms in the known universe. Scientists spent decades struggling with the ‘protein folding problem’, managing to unravel only a tiny fraction of the potential billions of proteins found in nature. That was until artificial intelligence got in on the act. Could the AlphaFold model developed by Google’s DeepMind unleash a new era of possibility that will transform science and the world around us?