About this episode

The episode features an interview with Professor Mohammed AlQuraishi discussing the impact of AI on molecular biology and protein folding.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . What is AI doing to medicine? Specifically, in molecular biology, and protein folding: figuring out the 3-D structure of proteins, which look like the output of a pasta-making machine on LSD. Remember DeepMind's AlphaFold and the announcement of it predicting 200 million protein structures? I have questions. And here to answer them is one of the top researchers in the world, Professor Mohammed AlQuraishi of Columbia University’s Department of Systems Biology, and a member of their Program for Mathematical Genomics. He heads a lab focused on biological perspectives at the molecular and systems levels. He has an MS in statistics and a PhD in genetics from Stanford University and was a Departmental Fellow at Harvard Medical School. As if that wasn’t enough, before this storied academic career, he founded two startups in the mobile computing space. We talk about Mohammed’s background in molecular biology, the big goals of that field and his North Star of understanding biology well enough to simulate it; why I haven’t yet seen the kind of revolutionary impact I was expecting from AlphaFold, what it means for a protein to fold and why…

People in this episode

Host: aiandyou

Guest: Mohammed AlQuraishi

Topics covered

• AI in medicine
• molecular biology
• protein folding
• AlphaFold
• biological research
• systems biology

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Columbia University, Harvard Medical School, DeepMind

Products: AlphaFold

Books & works: HumanCusp Blog

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