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Leader and Humans

Untangling life's molecular mysteries using AI is a welcome advance

3 August 2022

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

DeepMind

“It has not escaped our notice…” With those famous words published in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick described the fundamental genetic significance of the double-helix structure of DNA, based on work by Rosalind Franklin. It was a pivotal moment in biology, allowing us to understand for the first time how living organisms store the recipes for making proteins – the molecular machines that do most of the hard work in our bodies – and pass them down the generations.

Another major step forward came in 2001, with the draft sequence of almost the entire human genome. That revealed the…

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