Whitney Pennington-Rogers

So you've referred to proteins as the workhorses of all living things.

You said in your talk, in fact, that almost everything that happens in biology happens because of proteins.

They do everything biologically.

from transporting nutrients to repairing damaged tissue to supporting our immune system.

And your work, of course, has been focused around creating new proteins.

Why has this been such a challenging thing for humanity to accomplish?

And of course, the groundbreaking thing that you've done, the Nobel Prize winning thing that you've done is using a computer program to design proteins from scratch.

Can you talk about how exactly you did this?

It's incredible.

And it seems like there are seemingly endless applications for this.

And in 2019, you shared a few of them.

And I'd love to talk about those that you shared in that talk.

But also, I'm really curious to know what excites you today when you think about applications for this.

It's incredible, and it seems exciting to think about all the ways that this could improve life for really all of us in different ways.

And you mentioned the sustainability work, which was something that you touched on very, very slightly in your 2019 talk, and it sounds like that's really ramped up since then.

How did you begin to think about sustainability work as a potential use case for this?

Well, it seems like that work is obviously very necessary, and I'm interested to also hear what other sorts of uses have revealed themselves in the years since you joined us.

It seems like sustainability, of course, health, medicine, what other areas have been sort of surprising places that you've been able to find protein design can be helpful?

How do we ensure and what role do you see yourself playing in ensuring that what you're creating is accessible and available to a wide range of people?

Keeping people's attention focused on this seems like the challenge of your work.