This is Science Friday. I'm Irafledo.

You're all familiar with proteins, right?

They're made of amino acids. They do many important jobs in the body, and they can take millions of different shapes.

And depending on their structure, they do radically different things in ourselves.

And for a long time, predicting those shapes for research was considered a grand biological challenge.

But in 2020, Google's AI lab, Deep Mind, released an early version of Alpha Fold.

That's a tool that was able to accurately predict

many of these structures necessary for understanding biology, predicting in a matter of minutes.

In 2024, the AlphaFold team was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the Advance. That's

how important they deemed it. Five years later, after its initial release,

we're checking in on the state of that tech and how it's being used in health research

with one of the lead scientists responsible for developing AlphaFold. John Jumper, a scientist at Google

Deep Mind and co-recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

John, welcome to Science Friday.

Oh, it's great to be here.

It's nice to have you.

All right, let's begin at the beginning.

Tell us what exactly protein folding is, why it's important to understand how it works.

Well, so one of the really important things to say is,

you know, the cell has a lot to do. It's in some sense a factory or a machine. It has many,

many parts. And those parts are all encoded in the DNA, right? We talk about DNA as the instruction

manual for the cell. And one of the big

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