Opinion

DeepMind, a U.K.-based firm that is part of Alphabet, Google's parent company, has developed an artificial intelligence and machine learning system that can predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins, decoding the amino acids that make up each protein. Last year, the system had 350,000 entries. Then on July 28, DeepMind co-founder and chief executive Demis Hassabis announced the expansion of the company's database of folded proteins to more than 200 million -- nearly all catalogued proteins known to science, including those in humans, plants, bacteria, animals and other organisms -- and that the company is making them publicly available and free, accessible with no more effort than a Google search. The database is called AlphaFold, and it is the equivalent of a James Webb Space Telescope for biology, providing astounding new visuals of a world beyond.