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Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction

nobelprize.org

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Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction

#91

Post by dist-epoch »

aborsy wrote: post #19

The AlphaFold paper has countless authors, many researchers and company resources underlying it. Hassabis’ contribution is management of resources and entrepreneurship, not the actual science. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists out there doing deep technical work, and they aren’t recognized. I think we might be the end of it, as the emphasis shifts to commercialization and product development. These AI dem…

> These AI demonstrations require so many GPUs, specialized hardware and data that nobody has but the biggest players. Moreover, they are engineering work, not really scientistic

So is the Large Hadron Collider.

Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction

#94

Post by [deleted] »

falcor84 wrote: post #32
pyb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper has a mention : "These authors contributed equally: ..." However, it appears that some the authors were more equal than others.

The Nobel prize isn't awarded for a paper. Even if (and that's a large if) all of these contributed equally to the results in the paper, some obviously did more than others to prepare the ground for that study.

[deleted]

Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction

#95

Post by cool-RR »

I wonder why various outlets, including DeepMind's blog, say that John Jumper is a "Senior Research Scientist". That's L5 which sounds like quite a low rank for a Nobel prize winner. I checked his LinkedIn and he's a director, which is around L8. I thought that maybe he was L5 during the publishing of the results, but no, he was either L6 or L7.

Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction

#96

Post by pm215 »

mhrmsn wrote: post #84

Great achievement, although I think it's interesting that this Nobel prize was awarded so early, with "the greatest benefit on mankind" still outstanding. Are there already any clinically approved drugs based on AI out there I might have missed? In comparison, the one for lithium batteries was awarded in 2019, over 30 years after the original research, when probably more than half of the world's population already us…

Arguably awarding early is more in line with the intention expressed in Nobel's will: "to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind". It seems to have drifted into "who did something decades ago that we're now confident enough in the global significance of to award a prize". I suspect that if the work the prize recognized reslly had to have been carried out in the preceding year the recipients would be rather different.

Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction

#97

Post by atmosx »

> Oppenheimer was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Physics three times[...] pondered why he was never bestowed the honor.

> “To understand this [...] you have to first examine the man’s academic life before and after the war.”

Quote from: https://discover.lanl.gov/news/0609-oppie-nobel-prize/

Not anymore. You're not required to know or have studied Chemistry to get a Nobel in Chemistry.

Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction

#98

Post by ilaksh »

For some reason this web page doesn't render properly in my browser. The main text overlaps the table of contents.

I'm using Chrome on KDE (Ubuntu) on a 1920 wide display (minus the side panel). I checked and I don't have the page zoomed.

https://i.imgur.com/fOOQ3Av.png

Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction

#99

Post by FrustratedMonky »

abm53 wrote: post #74
aborsy wrote: post #19

The AlphaFold paper has countless authors, many researchers and company resources underlying it. Hassabis’ contribution is management of resources and entrepreneurship, not the actual science. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists out there doing deep technical work, and they aren’t recognized. I think we might be the end of it, as the emphasis shifts to commercialization and product development. These AI dem…

I did raise an eyebrow at it too, but I doubt his contribution was entirely “management of resources”. I think one must also give him the credit for the vision, risk taking and drive to apply the resources at his disposal, and RL, to these particular problems. Without that push this research would never have been done, but there may have been many fungible people willing to iron out the details (and, to be fair, cont…

Agree. Hassabis is more than a manager. He did start DeepMind with just a few people and was a big part of the brains behind it.

Now that it has grown he might be doing more management. But the groundwork that went into AlphaFold was built on all the earlier Alphaxxx things they have built, and he contributed.

It isn't like other big tech managers that just got some new thing dumped in their lap. He did start off building this.

Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction

#100

Post by theGnuMe »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #67

Demis Hasabis has a really interesting and unusual CV for a nobel laureate [1], he started his career in AI game programming (he worked e.g. on Popoulous II, Syndicate, Theme Park for Bullfrog, and later for Lionhead Studios on Black & White) before doing a PhD in neuroscience, becoming an entrepreneur and starting DeepMind. I would say this is a refreshing and highly uncommon pick for a nobel prize, really cool to s…

Yes but he could have been one... He really took to AI and reignited the fire that melted the AI winter.
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