[HN Gopher] AlphaFold developers win $3M breakthrough prize ___________________________________________________________________ AlphaFold developers win $3M breakthrough prize Author : dopu Score : 146 points Date : 2022-09-22 17:46 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.nature.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com) | hanniabu wrote: | Does this solve protein folding? | [deleted] | keepquestioning wrote: | What's the next AlphaFold? I want to get in early | dekhn wrote: | I expect them to get the Nobel prize in Chemistry in about two- | three weeks. | nnm wrote: | From my chat with friends who work in the area of drug design, | AlphaFold is accurate for overall structure, but is not that | accurate for predicting structure around interaction locations. | amrrs wrote: | Isn't that quite a big claim? My question, Is that work with | Alphafold that significant that it warrants the eyes of Nobel | committee? Genuinely curious. | dhdc wrote: | The joke is that the Nobel prize in chemistry is often | awarded to non-chemists. | ISL wrote: | It could also draw the attention of the Physics Nobel | committee. Oodles of physicists have been working on the | folding inverse-problem for decades. | UniverseHacker wrote: | In my opinion, absolutely. The "protein folding problem" has | been widely regarded as one of the biggest challenges in | molecular biology for over half a century, and Alphafold has | effectively solved it. I would put this up there with Sanger | winning the prize for discovering how to sequence DNA and | Kary Mullis for inventing PCR... this will have widespread | implications for allowing us to understand, and even design | proteins. | dekhn wrote: | But they didn't solve the protein folding problem. They | solved a simpler problem, protein structure prediction. | | What is important about their discovery is that we now know | for certain that a judicious combination of expensive-to- | obtain structure information, and easy-to-obtain protein | sequence relationships can be used to build a generalized | protein structure predictor (it can predict structures with | no prior example of a fold, although there are limits)... | and you don't have solve the general folding problem to do | it. You do not need to know the path, to get to the | destination! | | Many of us in the field expected this to be true but there | wasn't any really good example to point to that was widely | accepted by the community. And in the ~year or so since | this was demonstrated, the community has already found a | wide range of uses for this that have validated the | structure predictions and demonstrated their utility- using | open codes and models. | gone35 wrote: | Not with recent results in Nature I believe reporting glaring | mispredictions. Lots of promotion notwithstanding, AlphaFold | may not be usable yet. | mxwsn wrote: | The Nobel committee usually prefers to wait and evaluate | longer-term impact, so I'd be quite surprised. CRISPR was | obviously revolutionary in 2013 (imo, more than alphafold), and | won the Nobel in 2020. | echelon wrote: | CRISPR is a revolutionary tool. | | AlphaFold doesn't solve folding. It makes metaheuristic | guesses without writing a bunch of quantum chemistry, | statistical physics, thermodyanamics, and topology maths / | algorithms. | | I don't mean to downplay AlphaFold, but we haven't solved | protein folding yet. This press is really getting ahead of | itself. | epvgwwqe wrote: | Seems pretty doubtful. Is there any high impact scientific | discovery that AlphaFold directly enabled at this point? | dekhn wrote: | The Nobel Prize does not only award scientists for enabling | high impact discoveries, but occasionally to people who make | a major discovery that has no immediate impact. There is | literature dribbling out from folks using AlphaFold models, | but that's not what they would be awarding here. This was a | long-standing problem that was convincingly solved. | epvgwwqe wrote: | If there is precedent for that, then sure they could win. | GeorgeJIrwin wrote: | When will we see the result of this breakthrough in our daily | life? | | The article mentions: | | > So far, the data have been harnessed to tackle problems ranging | from antibiotic resistance to crop resilience. | | Is any of them is about to be used in our daily life and solve a | major problem? | TaupeRanger wrote: | Except the article is wrong. "Tackle" is doing a lot of | work...it doesn't actually mean anything in this case, as | AlphaFold has not been shown to help in antibiotic resistance | (compounds found using it haven't even been tested in the real | world), and has not increased crop resilience in any | independent peer reviewed studies or in the real world. It's | all still hype at this point. | aardvarkr wrote: | "It's all still hype at this point" implies this is vaporware | when it's a real thing that has solved one of the biggest | roadblocks in microbiology. Your claim is analogous to | lithium batteries, invented in 1976, taking 25+ years before | completely DOMINATING the modern battery market. Science | takes time to go from the research stage to mass market | adoption. Level set your expectations. | TaupeRanger wrote: | You picked a convenient analogy. No one knew whether | lithium batteries were going to be as useful as they were. | Much additional testing and work was necessary to prove it. | It COULD have failed. Same with Alpha Fold. Abandon your | expectations. | xiphias2 wrote: | Denis Hassabis has talked about the next evolution of AlphaFold | to be developed (and what the team is working on): predicting | interactions between proteins. If they are successful (which I | really hope they will be as a person with both chronic illness | and relatives and friends with illnesses), I can't think of any | drug research where it won't accerelate the drug development. | bismuthcrystal wrote: | Logic compels us to conclude that we will see some results of | this on our daily lives and it will become the solution to some | "problems". | | Problem is, our major problems are mostly social. Biologists | will sell you the story that this is a breakthrough that will | empower us to improve crop yield and solve world hunger. But we | all know we could already have solved it. Turns out the US | rather spend billions to build another aircraft carrier instead | of develop Africa's farm machinery industry. It is sad. But it | is the world. | krastanov wrote: | More resilient crops and reliable antibiotics is "daily life" | and "major problem". | Royi wrote: | I wonder what people, in 100 years, would say about our era. | | One might research, work hard and solve a problem that might | change the course of development of a major field and win a | recognition by $3M while someone which fills few numbers on a | lottery ticket may earn 1-2 folds more. | | I wish the system would give this kind of efforts and stories a | bigger exposure, recognition and compensation. | | Edit: The idea was about the prize amount, not those specific | people. It wasn't the best choice, but the idea was that even as | a statement, prizes for scientific achievements should be higher | so they will be an extreme to all people to recognize and strive | for. I guess one could find a better analogy than what I had in | mind. | whimsicalism wrote: | People are generally compensated for providing goods/services | people get value out of. I doubt in 100 years this will be an | alien concept. | derac wrote: | The lottery isn't comparable, first of all it's a money raising | scheme. I'm sure the alphafold team is well compensated. Almost | certainly making high 6 figures. Alphafold got a massive amount | of well-deserved coverage as well. | Drakim wrote: | Your point is good but the direction of your contempt is | misplaced. Lottery winners accounts for a tiny fraction of | people who have unearned and undeserved wealth, and in terms of | how many people they screwed over to get to riches, they are | like angels in comparison to other rich people. | random314 wrote: | Alice walton comes to mind | | https://www.mic.com/articles/79039/the-untold-story-of- | alice... | | And let's not talk about the Sacklers | Royi wrote: | I agree with you. I should have made a better choice than | lottery. My intention was that the needle which sets the | reward for research, long life work pursuing the solution of | a problem should move to the right and get those people more. | | $3M isn't enough in our days to recognize remarkable work in | my opinion. Yes, one of them made a lot of money, but is it | true for all the past winners of this prize? | nightski wrote: | I'm curious, what would be the right amount in your | opinion? How would you value it? | nend wrote: | The great wall of china was partially funded by lotteries. I | don't think anyone from the future is going to have anything to | say about today's lotteries. Lotteries will probably still be | popular in a hundred years. | jonas21 wrote: | Demis Hassabis made tens, if not hundreds of millions of | dollars in the Deep Mind acquisition. I'm sure most people | would consider that to be adequate compensation. | | If anything, the lesson is that if you care about making lots | of money from your research (not everybody does), start a | company. And it's easier for academics to start companies today | than in any other era. | Royi wrote: | I agree, my wording was not perfect. | | My point was that such a prize should be backed with more | money. Even for the sake of a statement what we consider to | be important. | | So the emphasize was about the enormous ratio between the two | and not about lottery being wrong (Moreover it pays for | itself). | [deleted] | modeless wrote: | The people who worked on AlphaFold were (and are) compensated | very well. Maybe they didn't win the lottery, but they probably | make between 10 and 40 times the median income. And they have | received a lot of recognition and exposure, I'd say probably | the right amount for the achievement. I'm sure there are issues | of this type in the world, but in this case I don't really see | a problem. | refulgentis wrote: | Quite funny to me that: | | - for the first time, there isn't mountains and mountains of | trolling in an Alphafold thread and the comments are _very_ quiet | | - the only reason why is a new account tried doing the trolling | | - comment is instadead without any manual flagging | | - but, people are afraid to post given the one try in 3 hours is | dead | mellosouls wrote: | Full list: | | https://breakthroughprize.org/News/73 | 420official wrote: | > ... were recognized for creating the tool that has predicted | the 3D structures of almost every known protein on the planet. | | I wonder if relying on a tool that doesn't 100% accurately | represent reality could have a negative effect on future research | [deleted] | flobosg wrote: | > that doesn't 100% accurately represent reality | | It could be argued that this is the case of every scientific | tool ever used. | JamesBarney wrote: | Current methods are not 100% accurate either. No study is 100%. | | Honestly the only field that has a P value that comes close to | 100% is physics. Even medicine which is far more rigorous than | most fields fails quite often in phase 3 trials after having | vetted it in phase 2. | tedsanders wrote: | Even physics is nowhere close to "100% accurate." Most fields | of physics approximate many body problems that are infeasible | to compute, let alone fully specify. E.g. Astrophysics, solid | state physics, nuclear physics, etc. Practitioners regularly | use empirically measured parameters like cross-sectional | scattering areas, and those parameters are updated and | narrowed over time. | dekhn wrote: | The predictions made by AlphaFold are now indistinguishable | from experimental data collection error so folks aren't super | concerned. Anyway structures are typically qualititaive tools | useful for thinking about proteins, rather than direct targets | of computational predictions (hasn't stopped people from | trying). | stainablesteel wrote: | its a decent enough start because scaling the instrumentation- | route of doing this is a lot slower than the ML approach, it | can only improve ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-22 23:00 UTC)