The Washington Post on AI’s impact on chemistry, biomedicine. One of this year's Nobel Prize winners in physics, Geoffrey Hinton, who pioneered work on the neural networks that undergird artificial intelligence, has warned that machines might someday get smarter than humans. Perhaps.
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The Washington Post on AI’s impact on chemistry, biomedicine. One of this year's Nobel Prize winners in physics, Geoffrey Hinton, who pioneered work on the neural networks that undergird artificial intelligence, has warned that machines might someday get smarter than humans. Perhaps. But this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry honored a real-world example of how AI is helping humans today with astounding discoveries in protein structure that have far-reaching applications. This is a development worth savoring.
Proteins are biology's lead actors. As the Nobel committee pointed out, proteins "control and drive all the chemical reactions that together are the basis of life. Proteins also function as hormones, signal substances, antibodies and the building blocks of different tissues." In the human body, they are necessary for the structure, function and regulation of tissues and organs. All proteins begin with a chain of up to 20 kinds of amino acids, strung together in a sequence encoded in DNA. Each chain folds into a unique structure, and those shapes determine how proteins interact with other molecules.
Looking like a tangled ball of twine, proteins have a complex and precise design of moving parts that are linked to chemical events and bind to other molecules. Antibodies are proteins produced by the immune system that bind to foreign molecules, including those on the surface of an invading virus, such as the spikes on the coronavirus that causes covid-19.
At the end of the 1950s, University of Cambridge researchers John Kendrew and Max Perutz successfully used a method called X-ray crystallography to produce the first 3D models of proteins. In recognition, they were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in chemistry. In the ensuing half-century, the quest to document protein structures remained laborious and slow. A single protein structure might take a doctoral student four or five years to figure out. Before AI, the field's central repository contained some 185,000 experimentally solved protein structures.