Demis Hassabis

used to come back to every five years is like, what would you need to model the full internals of a cell so that you could do experiments on the virtual cell and what those experiment, you know, in silico and those predictions would be useful for you to save you a lot of time in the wet lab, right?

That would be the dream.

Maybe you could 100x speed up experiments by doing most of it in silico, the search in silico, and then you do the validation step in the wet lab.

That would be, that's the dream.

And so, but maybe now, finally, so I was trying to build these components, alpha fold being one, that would allow you eventually to model the full interaction, a full simulation of a cell.

And I'd probably start with a yeast cell, and partly that's what Paul Nurse studied, because a yeast cell is like a full organism that's a single cell, right?

So it's the kind of simplest single cell organism.

And so it's not just a cell, it's a full organism.

And

And yeast is very well understood.

And so that would be a good candidate for a kind of full simulated model.

Now, alpha fold is the solution to the kind of static picture of what does a protein look, 3D structured protein look like, a static picture of it.

But we know that biology, all the interesting things happen with the dynamics, the interactions.

And that's what AlphaFold3 is the first step towards is modeling those interactions.

So first of all, pairwise, you know, proteins with proteins, proteins with RNA and DNA.

But then the next step after that would be modeling maybe a whole pathway, maybe like the TOR pathway that's involved in cancer or something like this.

And then eventually you might be able to model, you know, a whole cell.

you know super fast yes um i don't know all the biological mechanisms but some of them take a long time yeah and so is that that's a level so the levels of interaction has a different temporal scale that you have to be able to model so that would be hard so you'd probably need several simulated systems that can interact at these different temporal dynamics or at least maybe it's like a hierarchical system so um you can jump up and down the the different temporal stages

So you've got to make a decision when you're modeling any natural system, what is the cutoff level of the granularity that you're going to model it to that then captures the dynamics that you're interested in.

So probably for a cell, I would hope that would be the protein level and that one wouldn't have to go down to the atomic level.