I thought we were ready.
Once we'd cracked Go,
I felt we were finally ready
after, you know,
almost 20 years of working on this stuff
to actually tackle
some scientific problems,
including protein folding.
And what we start with is painstakingly,
over the last 40-plus years,
experimental biologists
have pieced together
around 150,000 protein structures
using very complicated, you know,
X-ray crystallography techniques
and other complicated
experimental techniques.
And the rule of thumb is
that it takes one PhD student
their whole PhD,
so four or five years,
to uncover one structure.
But there are 200 million
proteins known to nature.
So you could just, you know,
take forever to do that.
And so we managed to actually fold,
using AlphaFold, in one year,
all those 200 million proteins
known to science.
So that's a billion years
of PhD time saved.
(Applause)