How did an AI called AlphaFold win a Nobel Prize?
The Folding Riddle
How did an AI called AlphaFold win a Nobel Prize?
In 2024, a Nobel Prize went to a team who built something curious: a computer program named AlphaFold. Not a person, not a telescope — a piece of software. To understand why, we have to talk about one of biology's oldest, stubbornest puzzles. It involves something so small you'll never see it, but so important that you are made of trillions of them right now.
Meet the protein. Proteins are the tiny machines that do almost everything inside living things — they digest your food, carry oxygen in your blood, and build your muscles and hair. Each one starts as a long, floppy chain, like a beaded necklace strung from twenty kinds of beads. The beads are called amino acids, and a protein might have hundreds of them in a row.
