“In the attempt to make scientific discoveries, every problem is an opportunity and the more difficult the problem, the greater will be the importance of its solution”*…
(Roughly) Daily is headed into its traditional Holiday hibernation; regular service will begin again very early in the New Year.
It seems appropriate (especially given the travails of this past year) to end the year on a positive and optimistic note, with a post celebrating an extraordinary accomplishment– Science magazine‘s (thus, the AAAS‘) “Breakthrough of the Year” for 2021…
In his 1972 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, American biochemist Christian Anfinsen laid out a vision: One day it would be possible, he said, to predict the 3D structure of any protein merely from its sequence of amino acid building blocks. With hundreds of thousands of proteins in the human body alone, such an advance would have vast applications, offering insights into basic biology and revealing promising new drug targets. Now, after nearly 50 years, researchers have shown that artificial intelligence (AI)-driven software can churn out accurate protein structures by the thousands—an advance that realizes Anfinsen’s dream and is Science’s 2021 Breakthrough of the Year.
AI-powered predictions show proteins finding their shapes: the full story: “Protein structures for all.”
And read Nature‘s profile of the scientist behind the breakthrough: “John Jumper: Protein predictor.”
* E. O. Wilson
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As we celebrate science, we might send well-connected birthday greetings to Robert Elliot Kahn; he was born on this date in 1938. An electrical engineer and computer scientist, he and his co-creator, Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet. Later, he and Vint, along with fellow computer scientists Lawrence Roberts, Paul Baran, and Leonard Kleinrock, built the ARPANET, the first network to successfully link computers around the country.
Kahn has won the Turing Award, the National Medal of Technology, and the Presidential Medal Of Freedom, among many, many other awards and honors.
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