Structural biologist Emmanuel Nee describes personally struggling for four to five years to phase a protein, then, using AlphaFold alongside one round of new experimental data, solving the structure in two to three months. ✦ AI generated
Emmanuel Nee · Machine Learning Street Talk · 2026-06-22 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 50:42
At that time, to phase a protein was like it still was really, really difficult. Um, so I tried several years, close to four, five years, and it wasn't successful. And with AlphaFold, imagine this is more than 10 years ago, with AlphaFold, I went back and did just one um, protein purification, collected the data, and with AlphaFold in combination, I got the structure in less than two, three months.
verbatim transcript · starts at 50:42
50:42Like, if you think about the before and after, we're living in a different world now. >> At that time, to phase a protein was like it still was really, really difficult. Um, so I tried several years, close to four, five years, and it wasn't successful. And with AlphaFold, imagine this is more than 10 years ago, with AlphaFold, I went back and did just one um, protein purification,
51:12collected the data, and with AlphaFold in combination, I got the structure in less than two, three months. >> And now it's his goal to train as many scientists as he can how to use this technology for the betterment of humankind. >> This year, with funding from Google DeepMind and Swedish Research Council, we have scaled up to 100, and there's no drop in the quality of the training. In
51:40fact, it was there was an improvement. So, based on this based on this, we want to train hundred scientists every year for the next 10 years. So, we're targeting close to 1,000 African scientists in the next decade to be able to utilize this tool effectively. And then, we want to form an emerging community of structural biology practitioners uh working on prevalent diseases in Africa. >> So, that was the AlphaFold show. Thank
52:18you very much to John and Emmanuel. Um yeah, the the conversation with John was very interesting. He's He's so inspiring because I think he is testament to the fact that even though we talk about all of these general purpose foundation models, to really advance the frontier and to build cutting-edge applications in science, we need to do a lot of engineering. We need um you know, domain knowledge. We need serious expertise.
52:41And a lot of our models will actually look quite hybrid. They'll look quite customized. And I think AlphaFold is a kind of proof of existence for the types of hybrid models that we can deploy to further the field of science. Um John, I wish you the very best of luck in your new position at Anthropic. And thanks for watching the show.