Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction

nobelprize.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 343 posts

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

#181

Post by varelse »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #169
DevX101 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you gave the $300,000 Bezos got from his father to 10,000 random Americans in 1994, none of them would have created a company the equivalent of Amazon's scale.

How many of those 10k would have the same background? We can pretend Bezos' dad raised him in a "normal" middle class background then randomly dropped 300K on him, or we can acknowledge he is the business equivalent of an Olympic athlete.

Bezos? Abandoned by his dad who was literally an alcoholic clown and raised by his mom and her 2nd husband Bezos?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Jorgensen

So $300K in 1994 is about $640K. That's nice but about 80th percentile of net worth. It's nice his parents believed in him. How many of your parents would do that for you? I'm sure at 1 in 5 of them have that kind of money because of the distribution here. So the difference here is He was smart, he got lucky, and your parents don't believe in you enough on this front.

But compare and contrast Bezos and Musk. Bezos's mid-life crisis is leaving his wife to run around on his yacht banging models. Musk's mid-life crisis is trying to destroy democracy so he and his mom won't have to pay US taxes. Neither one is a role model, but I don't even get the point of the latter.

Which brings us back to AlphaFold. The AlphaFold team did something amazing. But also, they had a backer that believed in them. David Baker, for better or worse, didn't achieve what they did and he'd been at it for decades. It's amazing what good backing can achieve.

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

#182

Post by whimsicalism »

tananan wrote: post #168
eig wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I'm sure one could look at number of published papers etc, but that metric is a lot to do with hype and I see it as a lagging indicator. A better one is seeing my grad-school friends with zero background in comp-sci or math, presenting their cell-biology results with AlphaFold in conferences and at lab meetings. They are not protein folding people either- just molecular biologists trying to present more evidence…

In both academic and industrial settings, I've seen an initial spark of hope about AlphaFold's utility being replaced with a resignation that it's cool, but not really useful. Yet in both settings it continued as a playing card for generating interest. There's an on-point blog-post "AI and Biology" ( https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ai-and-biology ) which illustrates why AlphaFold's real breakthrough is not…

That article explains why AI might not work so well further down the line biology discoveries, but I still think alphafold can really help with the development of small molecule therapies that bind to particular known targets and not to others, etc.

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

#184

Post by benrapscallion »

pm215 wrote: post #96
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 precedin…

Shouldn’t this be GLP1RAs (semaglutide etc.) for the last year?

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

#185

Post by hyperbrainer »

afthonos wrote: post #150
myworkinisgood wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rules of the prize can be changed.

Can they? I mean, in the sense that you can yolo anything, sure, but the prizes were designed in a time when it was (more) reasonable to award them to individuals, and they are defined in a will. There may not be a mechanism for updating the standards.

Yes, they can. In 1901, science was not nearly as collaborative as it is today. Especially considering the need for a Nobel Prize to be experimental and the fact that most major labs today _need_ dozens of people.

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

#186

Post by eig »

adastra22 wrote: post #179
eig wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I'm sure one could look at number of published papers etc, but that metric is a lot to do with hype and I see it as a lagging indicator. A better one is seeing my grad-school friends with zero background in comp-sci or math, presenting their cell-biology results with AlphaFold in conferences and at lab meetings. They are not protein folding people either- just molecular biologists trying to present more evidence…

But Crispr actually edited genes. How much of this theoretical work was real, and how much was slop? Did the grad students actually achieve confirmation of their conformational predictions?

Surprisingly, yes the predicted structures from AlphaFold had functional groups that fit with experimental data of binding partners and homologues. While I don't know whether it matched with the actual crystallization, it did match with those orthogonal experiments (these were cell biology, genetics, and molecular biology labs, not protein structure labs, so they didn't try to actually crystalize the proteins themselves).

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

#187

Post by chongli »

nextworddev wrote: post #135
singularity2001 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whose father was one of the leading local industrialists (installing the first electric lighting for the 1885 Munich Oktoberfest)

It’s fascinating how the affluent backgrounds of many famous scientists and entrepreneurs are downplayed. Eg Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, etc

Because having some degree of runway is almost always necessary but never sufficient. Thousands of Americans receive similar amounts of money from their parents in the form of inheritance of the family home and other major assets. Only one took windfall of that size and created Amazon.

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

#189

Post by BurningFrog »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #81
t_mann wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's 8 densely printed pages of contributors to a discovery that lead to a Nobel prize: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.7214#page=26 Guess how many of them were included in the prize. It's a shame that the Nobel committee shies away from awarding it to institutions, but the AlphaFold prize doesn't even make the top 10 in a list of most controversial omissions from a Nobel prize. It's a simple case of lab director gets t…

Perhaps it's time the prize goes to the discovery itself instead of a person.

How do you give $1M to a discovery?

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

#190

Post by InkCanon »

matsemann wrote: post #177
InkCanon wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think looking back five years from now, this will be viewed as another Kissinger/Obama but wrt STEM. Given far too prematurely under pressure to keep up with the Joneses/chase the hype.

Original intent of the prizes is, however, to reward those that recently contributed good. Not to be a lifetime award after seeing how things pan out.

Yes, but the good has to be extraordinary. If there's logic to it, in these cases they are predicting the good will come much later. Which is an incredibly difficult prediction to make.
Post reply on HN