Demis Hassabis, CEO and cofounder of DeepMind Technologies, speaks during the DLD conference in MunichThis story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers.Google-owned DeepMind, an AI startup based in London, is facing some backlash from the scientific community after announcing its AlphaFold program was a "solution" to the protein folding problem.
John Moult, chair of the academic competition which heralded DeepMind's breakthrough, defended the findings, telling Business Insider he had looked at the results 'very carefully'. Academics and researchers are debating claims by Google-owned AI firm DeepMind that it's solved one of the toughest problems in biology, warning against overhyping the breakthrough.
DeepMind's breakthrough was part of CASP , a global competition specifically set up to test research teams on their ability to predict a protein's shape from its sequence of amino acids. The way proteins move around inside your body — transforming from a string of amino acids into more complicated 3D structures — has big implications for your health, and is linked to everything from Alzheimer's to the flu. That's why scientists have spent the better part of 50 years trying to predict their movement.
This year, the latest version of AlphaFold had been trained on a "Protein Data Bank", made up of around 170,000 different structures, and matched up with predictions made by scientists in labs — a much longer and more expensive process — with high accuracy in two-thirds of cases. Professor Mike Thompson, an expert in structural biology at the University of California, branded the idea that protein folding had been solved "laughable".
Lior Pachter, a professor of computational biology at the California Institute of Technology, agreed, writing"I don't mind that Google hyped this," he wrote.