IT TOOK decades for scientists to unlock the structure of just 17 per cent of the proteins in the human body. But UK-based AI company DeepMind raised the bar to 98.5 per cent in July when it announced that its AlphaFold model could quickly and reliably calculate the way proteins fold. This could lead to targeted drugs that bind to specific parts of molecules. We caught up with Pushmeet Kohli at DeepMind to see how work is progressing with mapping almost every one of the more than 100 million known proteins that have been sequenced from across the tree of life. Were you surprised at the success of AlphaFold, considering that figuring out protein folding previously required vast supercomputers?