How one scientist coped when AI beat him at his life's work

It was with a strangely deflated feeling in his gut that Harvard biologist Mohammed AlQuraishi made his way to Cancun for a scientific conference in December. Strange because a major advance had just been made in his field, something that might normally make him happy. Deflated because the advance hadn't been made by him or by any of his fellow academic researchers. It had been made by a machine. DeepMind, an AI company that Google bought in 2014, had outperformed all the researchers who'd submitted entries to the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) conference, which is basically a fancy science contest for grown-ups. Every two years, researchers working on one of the biggest puzzles in biochemistry, known as the protein folding problem, try to prove how good their predictive powers are by submitting a prediction about the 3D shapes that certain proteins will take.