[Tech] AlphaFold - Demis Hassabis

From Lex Fridman: https://lexfridman.com/demis-hassabis/Transcripts from Karpathy's https://karpathy.ai/lexicap/0299-large.htmllink | 00:37:13.160 So let's go to the basic building blocks of biologylink | 00:37:16.960 that I think is another angle at which you can startlink | 00:37:20.200 to understand the human mind, the human body,link | 00:37:22.280 which is quite fascinating,link | 00:37:23.400 which is from the basic building blocks,link | 00:37:26.640 start to simulate, start to modellink | 00:37:28.960 how from those building blocks,link | 00:37:30.480 you can construct bigger and bigger, more complex systems,link | 00:37:33.080 maybe one day the entirety of the human biology.link | 00:37:35.820 So here's another problem that thoughtlink | 00:37:39.680 to be impossible to solve, which is protein folding.link | 00:37:42.720 And Alpha Fold or specifically Alpha Fold 2 did just that.link | 00:37:48.840 It solved protein folding.link | 00:37:50.320 I think it's one of the biggest breakthroughs,link | 00:37:53.400 certainly in the history of structural biology,link | 00:37:55.140 but in general in science,link | 00:38:00.240 maybe from a high level, what is it and how does it work?link | 00:38:04.840 And then we can ask some fascinating questions after.link | 00:38:08.700 Sure.link | 00:38:09.980 So maybe to explain it to people not familiarlink | 00:38:12.880 with protein folding is, you know,link | 00:38:14.400 first of all, explain proteins, which is, you know,link | 00:38:16.980 proteins are essential to all life.link | 00:38:18.840 Every function in your body depends on proteins.link | 00:38:21.520 Sometimes they're called the workhorses of biology.link | 00:38:23.920 And if you look into them and I've, you know,link | 00:38:25.340 obviously as part of Alpha Fold,link | 00:38:26.660 I've been researching proteins and structural biologylink | 00:38:30.200 for the last few years, you know,link | 00:38:31.760 they're amazing little bio nano machines proteins.link | 00:38:34.760 They're incredible if you actually watch little videoslink | 00:38:36.460 of how they work, animations of how they work.link | 00:38:39.000 And proteins are specified by their genetic sequencelink | 00:38:42.600 called the amino acid sequence.link |