[Tech] AlphaFold - Demis Hassabis

From Lex Fridman: https://lexfridman.com/demis-hassabis/
Transcripts from Karpathy's https://karpathy.ai/lexicap/0299-large.html

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00:37:13.160 
So let's go to the basic building blocks of biology

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00:37:16.960 
that I think is another angle at which you can start

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to understand the human mind, the human body,

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which is quite fascinating,

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which is from the basic building blocks,

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start to simulate, start to model

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how from those building blocks,

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you can construct bigger and bigger, more complex systems,

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maybe one day the entirety of the human biology.

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So here's another problem that thought

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to be impossible to solve, which is protein folding.

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And Alpha Fold or specifically Alpha Fold 2 did just that.

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It solved protein folding.

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I think it's one of the biggest breakthroughs,

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certainly in the history of structural biology,

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but in general in science,

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00:38:00.240 
maybe from a high level, what is it and how does it work?

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And then we can ask some fascinating questions after.

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00:38:08.700 
Sure.

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00:38:09.980 
So maybe to explain it to people not familiar

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with protein folding is, you know,

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first of all, explain proteins, which is, you know,

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proteins are essential to all life.

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Every function in your body depends on proteins.

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Sometimes they're called the workhorses of biology.

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And if you look into them and I've, you know,

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obviously as part of Alpha Fold,

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I've been researching proteins and structural biology

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for the last few years, you know,

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they're amazing little bio nano machines proteins.

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They're incredible if you actually watch little videos

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of how they work, animations of how they work.

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And proteins are specified by their genetic sequence

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called the amino acid sequence.

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