31–40 of 98 posts
It's pretty clear at this point that the work led to a large improvement in psp scores, but there's literally nothing else groundbreaking about it; I don't mean that in a bad way, except to criticize all the breathless press about applications and pharma.
What are the big implications of being good at predicting protein structures?
This can be applied to just about any area of biology. You could design novel antigens to combat disease, and then easily mass-produce them. Or just inject the RNA to have the body produce them.
But the applications are boundless, from genetically modifying crops, to anti-aging, and more.
It is also one of the key pathways to molecular nanotechnology, where instead of building arbitrary structures out of amino acids, we increase the range of arbitrary molecules we can design, build, and produce in quantity.
What are the big implications of being good at predicting protein structures?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why did they open source it? Wouldn’t this model be very valuable to the pharma industry?
It is written in the article. A few reasons could be pressure from the publishing magazine, emerging open source implementations of the same idea, and the fact that this is still far from easy to comercialize.
A lot of people will say "Unless you opensource my work and that of my colleagues, I quit".
When faced with all your best people threatening to quit, you might just opensource that work. It turns out you still have an advantage by being ~1 year ahead on applying it to anything, and having all the people who know how it works on your staff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why did they open source it? Wouldn’t this model be very valuable to the pharma industry?
It is written in the article. A few reasons could be pressure from the publishing magazine, emerging open source implementations of the same idea, and the fact that this is still far from easy to comercialize.
How does work like this get funded? It's awesome, but it seems so far removed from... let's say "profit". And there are several teams competing in these things. Are there places that really fund advanced work like this, or is it mostly graduate student underpaid labor?
Awesome. I wrote a thesis on protein structure prediction in 1995. We weren't very good at it then. Amazing to see this.
How does work like this get funded? It's awesome, but it seems so far removed from... let's say "profit". And there are several teams competing in these things. Are there places that really fund advanced work like this, or is it mostly graduate student underpaid labor?
A group of your competitors then trashes your proposal in a group and if you've properly massaged the right backs, you get a pittance, which permits you to struggle to keep up with all your promises.