The world shattering discovery that you might have missed

If your day job doesn't involve drug discovery or understanding the molecular biology that underpins disease, then you might have missed what is possibly the most seismic advance in health science since the discovery of the smallpox vaccine. To bring you into the picture, AlphaFold is open-source AI developed by DeepMind (a subsidiary of Google's parent company, Alphabet). In 2020, while we were all distracted by COVID-19, AlphaFold quietly presented the world with the holy grail of the biological sciences - the ability to accurately predict the three demential structure of protein from a sequence of amino acids. If that does't sound earth shattering... keep reading. Proteins are strings of amino-acids that are folded up into a very particular shape.