The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 (9 October 2024)
They cracked the code for proteins' amazing structures
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 is about proteins, life’s ingenious chemical tools. David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 was awarded with one half to David Baker “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind chief, and John M. Jumper, Google DeepMind, London, United Kingdom, “for protein structure prediction”. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have successfully utilized artificial intelligence to predict the structure of almost all known proteins. David Baker has learned how to master life’s building blocks and create entirely new proteins. Nobel Laureate David Baker is a professor of biochemistry, HHMI investigator, and the director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington.
Excerpt from Digitalism vs. Capitalism (p. 155, 28 July 2024):
“Capitalism is the most expensive mode of production
At a time when AI is shocking so many populations, the convergence of human intellect with AI and vice versa should not have surprised anyone. Today, we know more about the human brain, thanks to technology, and the so-called computer brain, an extension of human intellect, so that we can easily play with both of them.
We are both the Solaris Ocean and the Solaris Space Station crew!
This is what digitalism is going to do to decipher the minds of organic and inorganic beings.
Convergence, overlaps, separations, various intermingling, and above all, connectedness, are the way things are going to be[*].
Under the circumstances in which we are living now, capitalists’ fear that AI will take over the power of ruling classes and lay-people’s fear that they will lose jobs and incomes are futile. A new mode of consumption and production is on the horizon. And a new mode of forces and relations of production is coming close, as we are turning into hunters and gatherers of information, talents, content, know-how, knowledge, signs, images, symbols, and data. We were doing these already in manual and sensory (perhaps in analog) ways; now it is time to let it all be done by the digitalization of life, which means Digitalism, if we insist on naming it.
[*]Organisms without brains can remember their past. Scientists found that Escherichia coli bacteria form their own kind of memory of exposure to nutrients. They pass these memories down to future generations, which can help them evade antibiotics, the research team reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. Stanislaw Lem told us a long time ago. Researchers theorize that when iron levels are low, bacterial memories are triggered to form a fast-moving migratory swarm to seek out iron in the environment. When iron levels are high, memories indicate this environment is a good place to stick around and form a biofilm. "Iron levels are definitely a target for therapeutics because iron is an important factor in virulence," Bhattacharyya said. "Ultimately, the more we know about bacterial behavior, the easier it is to combat it." Souvik Bhattacharyya is the lead author and a provost early-career fellow in the Department of Molecular Biosciences at UT.
Memory is usually associated with higher organisms rather than bacteria. However, evidence is mounting that many regulatory networks within bacteria are capable of complex dynamics and multi-stable behaviors that have been linked to memory in other systems. Moreover, it is recognized that bacteria that have experienced different environmental histories may respond differently to current conditions. These “memory” effects may be more than incidental to the regulatory mechanisms controlling acclimation or to the status of the metabolic stores. Rather, they may be regulated by the cell and confer fitness to the organism in the evolutionary game it participates in.
“Memory in Microbes: Quantifying History-Dependent Behavior in a Bacterium” Denise M. Wolf, Lisa Fontaine-Bodin, Ilka Bischofs, Gavin Price, Jay Keasling, and Adam P. Arkin
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
“The amount of digital data produced has long been outpacing the amount of storage available. This project enables molecular-level data storage into DNA molecules by leveraging biotechnology advances in synthesizing, manipulating, and sequencing DNA to develop archival storage. Microsoft and University of Washington researchers are collaborating (opens in a new tab) to use DNA as a high-density, durable, and easy-to-manipulate storage medium.” Microsoft.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-
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