How AI Could Change Biology

Hank missed a golden opportunity to say "the future of biology is unfolding."

I love the scishow episodes where you can tell Hank is actually excited.

I'm starting my PhD studies in a few weeks, the subject being protein folding (with NMR). Pretty excited about all this AI stuff !

I wish my biology teachers at school had given half a hint at how exciting and amazing biology is! Hats off to the teams and all the biologists who made this possible!

As a molecular biologist myself, I can see why this makes Hank present this episode with and extra dose of passion. This is a revolution that shortens years-worth of lab research to days or even hours.

The fact that discoveries like this are made free for academic use gives me not only hope in humanity, but hope FOR humanity. Thank you to everyone involved in this research.

I remember a few years ago, making a prediction of a protein's structure from it's sequence even by seq comparison was impresice and time consuming, this is truly revolutionary

Being able to simulate protein interactions is going to be absolutely massive. In the future, being able to safely predict what will happen when a gene is edited with CRISPR will permanently alter the course of human evolution.

I'm a biotech engineering student, and this just blew my mind wide open. I cannot fathom how much the world is about to change. These kinds of dicoveries and inventions are keystones in human evolution, and I'm happy just to live in the same time as one is being discovered/invented:). It would be dope to apply it in a couple of years in my career and bring something good to humankind, though

As awesome as this is, the coolest part for me is how they immediately shared the full methods and codes 😎

The future of biology is unfolding before our very eyes 🧬

So happy both groups released their code - I hope important tools like these always remain free and open to use!

Suddenly it feels like I might be able to see cancer become a curable problem in my lifetime. Just imagining people getting cured from cancer without going through the horrors of chemo is so heartwarming.

The way he presents we can see how excited he is about it. He made me excited too like I am gonna do something with it tomorrow even though I don't have any science background at all. 🤣🤣🤣

I’ve worked in the crystallography field since starting grad school back in 2003 - this is an absolute revolution. Without even looking it up, as soon as I heard Univ of Washington, I knew David Baker’s lab would be involved with this somehow. I love reading their papers.

I'm terrified by the toxicological implications of this. It took us decades to realize that many plastics had long-term, non-acute interactions. Being able to make a custom protein that does a designed task wonderfully is good news -- but what about the Law of Unintended Consequences for these designer proteins? I hope like hell the protein designers consider toxicology tests before racing to wide-spread usage.

This feels like one of those things that is a flashback in a history lesson of some utopian society hundreds of years in the future. "In 2021, two teams of researchers made a breakthrough understanding in our ability to simulate protein folding, and then released their techniques freely for academic use. This ushered in an unprecedented era of human progress, giving us headway towards final victory into some of humanity's largest problems which had been seen as practically intractable up to that point." Flash forward to present day and play out the story describing all the ways it fundamentally improved the world, and the ways those developments played out on a societal level

This is such a massive step forward in biochemistry that I can't even predict all of the applications it will bring forward.

I love how excited Hank is about this. Amazing stuff! Will be cool to see where this goes.

This is the exact meaning of “AI is a tool.” It can’t do everything, but it can be used to do everything.