2020

AlphaFold Solves Protein Folding

DeepMind's AlphaFold solves protein structure prediction — a 50-year grand challenge in biology — with accuracy rivaling experimental methods. It predicts the 3D shapes of nearly every known protein, work that would have taken experimental scientists centuries. Overnight, structural biology leaps forward by decades. This is the moment AI stops being merely impressive and becomes indispensable to science. Drug discovery, disease understanding, enzyme design — all accelerated by a neural network doing in hours what labs couldn't do in years.