Review: Truth and Consequences for Whistleblowers
I magine a world where in a matter of minutes, scientists could identify drugs to treat incurable diseases, design chemicals that could break down plastics to clean up pollution, and develop new materials that can suck excess carbon dioxide out of the air to help address climate change. This is the promise of new biology- and chemistry-based models that use artificial intelligence, or AI, to perform traditionally time-consuming tasks such as determining the structures of proteins.
Google DeepMind, a private research subsidiary of Google, released the highly anticipated AlphaFold 3 model last month as a paper in Nature. This model claims to be an improvement over its earlier version, AlphaFold 2, because it can predict not just protein structures, but also how they interact with RNA, DNA, and — most importantly — drugs. DeepMind said that it hopes AlphaFold 3 will “transform our understanding of the biological world and drug discovery.”
However, it’s unlikely to change how computer scientists such as myself understand biology anytime soon, because Nature, the highly competitive journal that states its mission is to “serve scientists,” allowed DeepMind to keep the software’s code unavailable, despite its own editorial policy requiring authors “to make materials, data, code, and associated protocols promptly available to readers without undue qualifications.”
