https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSDEUYNujxU
Richard Feynman made this speech in 1959 - two years after the launch of Sputnik. Basically, he thought it would be interesting if one can make things atom by atom. He thought the way to make nanotechnology was through electron microscopes. And, that might still happen. There's been great progress there. They are manipulating single atoms with electron microscopes. But, I just wanted to introduce Feynman's talk here to point out the recent Protein folding advances.
Richard Feynman dropped the idea of nanotechnology and went back to particle physics. Then, in the 1970's, an Eric Drexler thought of nanotechnology. He tried to make it happen. About all he did was work on the mathematics and theory of it. Well, his favorite idea to making nanotechnology happen was through protein folding.
The problem with the protein pathway was the protein folding problem. Researchers back then couldn't predict how a set of amino acids could fold into a protein. Eric Drexler thought of designing the proteins to be predictable. That clearly didn't happen. Well last November, al alphafold company, really an A.I. company, showed that they could predict protein folding to molecular accuracy(in most cases).
Alphafold kept it to themselves; or, they charged researchers a high price to get one protein.
I should mention that previously, protein folding researchers could only figure out like one protein a few years. The alphafold team could solve an amino acid sequence in a few minutes.
Then, a month or two ago now, another team, the Institute for Protein folding, came out with their own protein folding software. When they announced the news, they had solved 4500 proteins. Their A.I. software could solve proteins in like ten minutes for your average protein, and maybe a few more minutes for larger proteins. They could also solve protein complexes; they could solve interconnected proteins.
The Institute for Protein Design made their software freely available. Soon, alphafold was forced to make their software available. As it turned out, they weren't just sitting on it. They were cranking out proteins. When they decided to follow suit with the "institute for protein folding", they released their database of solved proteins - they had 350,000 proteins. By the end of the year, they will have solved all the known proteins made by the human body, and ten other organisms. They can solve so many proteins in such a short time, they can solve all the proteins produced by a given organism in a year or so!
The medical advances, and the science advances are obvious. I know that David Baker is aware of Drexler's nanotech, and has even made protein machines parts - gears and drivetrains before his team came out with their new protein folding software.
