Science has a way of amazing us and it can do it in ways we would never expect. When you stop to think about how computers would fill an entire room just a few decades ago and we are now wearing a computer of similar power on our wrists today, it’s difficult to know where things will go from here. That is especially true of artificial intelligence, which most people call AI. Although computers do not yet have the ability to think and react in the same way as the human brain, AI has taken huge strides in that direction. It leads many people to wonder where we will go from here.
One particular AI that people are familiar with is Deepmind. It is from Google and it seems that it was able to solve a scientific problem that was some 5 decades in the making. Scientists have not been able to figure out the issues behind mapping the 3D shapes of proteins, including those that are responsible for COIVD-19. This type of ‘protein folding’ has been elusive for scientists but Google’s Deepmind may have solved it in just a few days. If it is successful, many problems we face today may be resolved.
DeepMind’s protein-folding AI has solved a 50-year-old grand challenge of biology https://t.co/usi9xlOoSY
— Jonathan Sarfati (@JonathanSarfat1) December 2, 2020
Deepmind worked on this project along with a group of scientists who have been trying to crack the code since 1994. They said: “Proteins are extremely complicated molecules, and their precise three-dimensional structure is key to the many roles they perform, for example the insulin that regulates sugar levels in our blood and the antibodies that help us fight infections.”
“Even tiny rearrangements of these vital molecules can have catastrophic effects on our health, so one of the most efficient ways to understand disease and find new treatments is to study the proteins involved.
“There are tens of thousands of human proteins and many billions in other species, including bacteria and viruses, but working out the shape of just one requires expensive equipment and can take years.”
It will be interesting to see where things go from here.