TED Talks Daily
Why building new proteins from scratch is our new superpower | David Baker
25 Jul 2025
The rapidly evolving field of protein design is revealing solutions to some of the world’s greatest problems, whether it's blocking a virus, breaking down a pollutant or creating brand-new materials. In conversation with TED’s Whitney Pennington Rodgers, biochemist David Baker explores his team’s Nobel Prize-winning work using AI to design new proteins with functions never before seen in nature — achieving breakthroughs that have fundamentally changed the future of science. (This conversation was part of an exclusive TED Membership event. TED Membership is the best way to support and engage with the big ideas you love from TED. To learn more, visit ted.com/membership.)For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Could the scientific study of proteins and protein design save the world? For computational biologist David Baker, the answer is yes. His belief in this led to his popular 2019 TED Talk receiving funding from TED's Audacious Project and... a Nobel Prize.
He sat down with TED curator Whitney Pennington Rogers for a recent TED membership event to dig into how much the science of protein design has progressed in the last six years, the surprising problems his team is able to solve for, and why he continues to believe wholeheartedly that designing new proteins can save the world.
Hi, David.
Great to be here.
Thank you for being with us. And first, congratulations on the Nobel Prize. I know that all of us at TED were really elated to see your work celebrated and recognized in that major way.
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.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of protein design in addressing global challenges?
it's definitely meaningful that TED could be part of your journey in that really important way and part of this important work. And we definitely get into all of that. But before we talk about the Nobel Prize and sort of where things have gone since 2019, when you joined us as a speaker and as an audacious grantee, I think it would be helpful to sort of set the stage with
some background on your work, sort of detailing the science that was recognized here connected to proteins. 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?
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.
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Chapter 3: How did David Baker's work lead to a Nobel Prize?
So I think there were a number of reasons why it didn't happen a much longer time ago.
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?
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. And so when I first began at the University of Washington, we studied how proteins actually fold up from their amino acid sequences to their three dimensional structures. And we studied that experimentally.
And as we began to learn more and more, we developed computer programs to mimic that process and to try to be able to go from, take a sequence and predict the structure.
And then after we had been doing that for some time, we realized that we could go backwards, not go from, like in biology, from the sequence to the structure and the function of the protein, but instead start with a new structure and a new function that don't exist and work backwards towards an amino acid sequence that would encode that new protein.
The difference is that in the biology case, the proteins are encoded in the genes in our genomes and the genes of all living things. In the design case, it's a completely new protein. So it doesn't exist. There's no gene that exists. So we have to make a synthetic gene, a synthetic piece of DNA that encodes this new protein.
Once we have that synthetic piece of DNA, we can put it into a bacterium and it will produce the protein and we can see whether it actually does what we designed it to do. So the first class of models we developed were traditional physical models where we sort of tried to describe all the interactions between all the atoms in the protein and how those interactions guide the protein to fold up.
And we made quite a bit of progress, some of which I briefly described in my 2019 talk. Now, since then, we've completely switched over to developing AI-based methods for protein design. And in these methods, we take the many, many examples of proteins whose structures have been determined by scientists really over the last 50 years. And there are about 250,000 of these structures now.
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Chapter 4: What breakthroughs have been made in protein design since 2019?
would be embedded directly in silicon nitride chips. And that's, again, a problem that nature never had to deal with because proteins in nature were never interfacing with electronic devices. And we've made quite a bit of progress there.
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?
Yes, I think we start off on with the methods we develop. We make those widely available. And so that's start. We're pretty interested in enabling protein design in countries where there isn't as much advanced infrastructure for
you know large-scale drug screening for example because with protein design really cuts down the cost in making uh proteins that to deal with uh with it with a challenge for example if you are a farmer in um in africa for example and you're dealing with a new type of of pests say a fungus or an insect we want to empower scientists and researchers in the
in the country that has the problem to actually use our methods to develop their own solutions to those problems, which may be pretty local. As things come out of here, One of the things that we do is when we license things that we have created to other entities, we always require that there be a carve out for for global health applications.
And that's something that the Gates Foundation is really pioneered. And so we try in every way we can to make sure that things we develop will be as broadly applicable as possible. I think It's a challenge currently that goes well beyond protein design to motivate the world to put the resources into ways of combating things like global warming and
and the accumulating plastic, there's been a lot of talk, but it's gonna take a lot of resources too, and we can't really control that. I'll give you an example of something that I am disappointed in. During the pandemic, there was a lot of talk about how we needed better methods for rapidly creating ways to deal with pandemic viruses.
And immediately after the pandemic or during the end of the pandemic, there were even some initiatives started to work on sort of faster approaches to develop ways to protect against new pathogens if they emerged. But within six months of the pandemic ending, the world kind of forgot about it.
So there are some issues with the way that the pull from the outside world in different areas is different, depending on how much profit can be made, which is a little bit too bad.
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