This segment briefly credits the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry as recognizing advances in computationally designing new proteins from scratch, shared with Dennis Hassabis for Google DeepMind's AlphaFold work on protein structure prediction. No explanation is given of how de novo protein design actually works or what problem it solves.
360 words · auto-generated from the episode video
1:57:05like, >> you know, godlike in our molecular capacity. It's really crazy that in this timeline, we've gone from >> what's a gene? >> Yes. Oh, it's on a chromosome to almost 100 years later. Yes, >> I designed a protein on my own using software. This is the culmination of biotechnology, artificial intelligence, computation, all sorts of stuff. It earned him the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which he actually shared with Dennis Hassabis um at Google Alpha >> Fold. Alpha uh deep uh Google Deep Mind. >> Deep Mind, sorry. Yeah. For Alpha Fold. for alpha which is again uh so incredible 2004 proof of the green towel
1:57:47theorem. >> Yes, this is Terrence Tao at UCLA >> and Ben Green at the University of Cambridge. They proved that um the sequence of prime numbers contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions meaning like progressions like you know 357 that's an arithmetic progression because there's three prime numbers that are two apart. um they showed that the sequence of prime numbers you you can give me any number of how apart they are >> and any number of how long and I'll find you such a sequence in all of the prime numbers which is kind of crazy when you think about how rare prime numbers get >> yes >> as you get larger and larger and how they're supposed to be completely random
1:58:27but there's still somehow some kind of structure but the randomness creates this structure it's really really cool it bridged additive cominatorics and number theory again one of few mathematics things that I kind of understand. >> I know we love to see it. 2005, the invention of optogenetics. >> Yes. Uh we talk about this a lot. Carl Daisoth, Ed Bdon, and Fang Jiang at Stanford and MIT, they developed optogenetics. This idea of channel proteins, proteins that open and close and let stuff through the cell membrane based on light. So I can shine a light beam and turn on cells and turn off cells. They used light sensitive algae proteins the same way that GFP is from
1:59:07like green fluorescent protein from like