David Baker

Great to be here.

Yeah, and in fact, much of the work that I talked about in my Nobel Prize address was supported by the TED Audacious Project.

So I'm very grateful to TED as well and excited to be back here.

Well, for many, many years, scientists studied the proteins that exist in nature, and they

I think they seemed almost like these magical elfin runes passed down from billions of years of evolution.

They were really special.

They're very different from anything that occurs outside of biology because they have these very precise properties, they have these exquisite functions.

The notion that you could design new ones that would do new things was really quite foreign.

When people tried to do it, it was very difficult.

So it was both that they seemed almost unattainable and that the attempts that were made were not successful.

And that even thinking about the methods for even how you would go about designing a protein with the new function didn't really exist.

So I think there were a number of reasons why it didn't happen a much longer time ago.

Yes.

And in fact, there's been a very big transition between 2019 when I gave the TED Talk and today.

So we began quite a few years ago.

to try to understand how the amino acid sequences of proteins determine their three-dimensional structures.

And just as a little bit of background so everyone's on the same page, the genes in our genomes each encode a protein.

That's what they do.

And the way they encode that protein is by specifying the sequence of amino acids in the protein.

And once that sequence is known, then that specifies what the three-dimensional structure is.