Funny things is how the general scientific community (including nature) defines 'impact'. I somehow still strangley trust the Nobel committee to take a different approach here. Was curious and found this interesting collection of references: https://www.researchgate.net/project/Enacting-Excellency-Awa... .
AlphaFold doesn't solve folding. It makes metaheuristic guesses without writing a bunch of quantum chemistry, statistical physics, thermodyanamics, and topology maths / algorithms.
I don't mean to downplay AlphaFold, but we haven't solved protein folding yet. This press is really getting ahead of itself.
"We confirm extensive promiscuity, but find that the average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (auROC) is 0.48, indicating weak model performance."
Derek Lowe had a post about this earlier this month [1] (which includes important qualifications I failed to omit).
[1] "Benchmarking AlphaFold-enabled molecular docking predictions for antibiotic discovery", Molecular Systems Biology 2022 18:e11081 https://doi.org/10.15252/msb.202211081
[2] "Not AlphaFold's Fault", September 7 2022, https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/not-alphafold-s-fa...
What would be more interesting is if we did a whole bunch of crystal or cryo-EM structures far from what we've previously determined and demonstrate whether alphafold could make out-of-class predictions for them.
By contrast, the breakthrough prize in physics was awarded to the entire event horizon telescope collaboration for their image of the supermassive black hole.
I would have assumed that the prize for alphafold would also been awarded to the whole team.
Kind of how most medical advancements come out of the US, which makes up only <4.25% of world population.
I know orgs dont scale like that and there are hits to productivity with orgs getting less lean but still.
The article mentions:
> So far, the data have been harnessed to tackle problems ranging from antibiotic resistance to crop resilience.
Is any of them is about to be used in our daily life and solve a major problem?
Problem is, our major problems are mostly social. Biologists will sell you the story that this is a breakthrough that will empower us to improve crop yield and solve world hunger. But we all know we could already have solved it. Turns out the US rather spend billions to build another aircraft carrier instead of develop Africa's farm machinery industry. It is sad. But it is the world.
I wonder if relying on a tool that doesn't 100% accurately represent reality could have a negative effect on future research
Honestly the only field that has a P value that comes close to 100% is physics. Even medicine which is far more rigorous than most fields fails quite often in phase 3 trials after having vetted it in phase 2.
It could be argued that this is the case of every scientific tool ever used.
- for the first time, there isn't mountains and mountains of trolling in an Alphafold thread and the comments are _very_ quiet
- the only reason why is a new account tried doing the trolling
- comment is instadead without any manual flagging
- but, people are afraid to post given the one try in 3 hours is dead
One might research, work hard and solve a problem that might change the course of development of a major field and win a recognition by $3M while someone which fills few numbers on a lottery ticket may earn 1-2 folds more.
I wish the system would give this kind of efforts and stories a bigger exposure, recognition and compensation.
Edit: The idea was about the prize amount, not those specific people. It wasn't the best choice, but the idea was that even as a statement, prizes for scientific achievements should be higher so they will be an extreme to all people to recognize and strive for. I guess one could find a better analogy than what I had in mind.
$3M isn't enough in our days to recognize remarkable work in my opinion. Yes, one of them made a lot of money, but is it true for all the past winners of this prize?
https://www.mic.com/articles/79039/the-untold-story-of-alice...
And let's not talk about the Sacklers
If anything, the lesson is that if you care about making lots of money from your research (not everybody does), start a company. And it's easier for academics to start companies today than in any other era.
My point was that such a prize should be backed with more money. Even for the sake of a statement what we consider to be important.
So the emphasize was about the enormous ratio between the two and not about lottery being wrong (Moreover it pays for itself).