I have already seen reports from biologists about AlphaFold solving protein structures that have resisted laboratory methods for decades [1,2]. It's hard for me

I have already seen reports from biologists about AlphaFold solving protein structures that have resisted laboratory methods for decades [1,2]. It's hard for me to see why this is not a transformative development for (one part of) basic biology. Note that the BBC article doesn't actually say that it will transform drug discovery! I know HN is inclined to be cynical about big claims, but it is not hard to find computational biologists (unaffiliated with DeepMind) saying that this is indeed a revolutionary advance for biology: * Mohammed AlQuraishi, a computational biologist at Columbia University in New York City and a CASP participant [...]’s strong hunch is that AlphaFold will be transformational. * “It’s a game changer,” says Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, who assessed the performance of different teams in CASP. [...] “This will change medicine. It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change everything,” Lupas adds. [1] "An AlphaFold prediction helped to determine the structure of a bacterial protein that Lupas’s lab has been trying to crack for years. Lupas’s team had previously collected raw X-ray diffraction data, but transforming these Rorschach-like patterns into a structure requires some information about the shape of the protein. Tricks for getting this information, as well as other prediction tools, had failed. “The model from group 427 gave us our structure in half an hour, after we had spent a decade trying everything,” Lupas says." https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4 [2] (unconfirmed) https://twitter.com/halvorz/status/1417535090385580033 https://twitter.com/halvorz/status/1417535090385580033