Scientists are using AI to invent proteins from scratch
Given proteins can do so many things, what if scientists could design bespoke versions to order? Novel proteins, never seen before in nature, could make biofuels, say, or clean up pollution or create new ways to harvest power from sunlight. David Baker, a biochemist and recent Nobel laureate in chemistry, has been working on that challenge since the 1980s. Now, powered by artificial intelligence and inspired by living cells, he is leading scientists around the world in inventing a whole new molecular world.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New Statesman
2 days ago
- New Statesman
The history of nuclear science
Photo byThe detonation of the first atomic bombs exactly 80 years ago sparked the formation of one of the largest political movements of scientists in history. 'The profession of science, due to the special importance of the consequences of its good or bad use, carries with it special responsibilities over and above those of the ordinary duties of citizenship,' proclaimed the 1948 charter of the World Federation of Scientific Workers, led by the Nobel laureate and communist Frédéric Joliot-Curie. These responsibilities were not merely ethical but political: they obliged scientists actively to 'work against the diversion of scientific effort to war preparations' and 'to resist movements inspired by anti-scientific ideas', including 'racial inequality and the glorification of force'. In 1946, the Federation of American Scientists, founded by former Manhattan Project workers and like-minded physicists, released a book and an accompanying short film entitled One World or None, which argued for the necessity of world government to 'abolish war' and prevent the repetition of the atrocities their research had enabled. The aims of nuclear scientists addressing the public today may be considerably more modest. A pair of new books, by the particle physicist Frank Close and the nuclear chemist Tim Gregory, present the story of atomic power as one of heroic discovery, guided by an implacable desire to unravel the most profound mysteries of the material world, which happened to give the rest of humanity knowledge it could decide to wield for good or for evil. Scientists did their part, and they can't really be blamed for having done so. Now it's up to the rest of us. This is an apologetic narrative, ultimately, whether it emphasises the innocence of scientific work completed before awareness of its perils dawned – as in Close's Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age 1895-1965 – or nuclear energy, whose potentially utopian rewards might outweigh the harm of the bomb, as in Gregory's Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World. While their most admirable predecessors in nuclear science understood that they would need to change the world if they were to regain pride in their scientific achievements, today's atomic ambassadors seem determined to insist that whatever destructive forces their field has unleashed are ultimately someone else's problem. Destroyer of Worlds has at least the virtue of sobriety. As his book's title suggests, Close does not mince words about the threat of nuclear weapons, nor does he attempt to sequester the history of nuclear physics from its catastrophic military applications. Because Close never forgets that his story ends with hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians killed and the survival of the planet in jeopardy, he narrates the key scientific achievements surveyed in the book without the sensationalism or sentimentality so often found in popular histories of science. His respect for his readers' intelligence is uncommonly clear. It is less clear what exactly Close believes to be the implications of the fact that his tale of discovery culminates in profound human tragedy. For the most part, he seems to feel that it was basically an accident. 'Pursuit of this hidden power source began innocently and collaboratively only to be taken by world events in the 1930s as the spectre of fascism loomed,' he writes early on. Close reprises the refrain near the end of the book: 'Had it not been for the unfortunate collapse of society to fascism, nuclear power rather than nuclear weapons would have led the way.' Between these bookends, however, Close's scrupulous research piles up evidence that this judgement is far too simple. HG Wells, he notes, coined the phrase 'atomic bomb' in a 1914 novel, based on his amateur reading of early research reports on radioactivity. The New Zealand-born British physicist Ernest Rutherford almost immediately recognised the disturbing implications of his discovery that each atom's positive charge is concentrated in an extremely small and energetically potent nucleus. 'At the present time we have not found a method of dealing with these forces and personally I am very hopeful we should not discover it until man is living at peace with his neighbours,' Rutherford warned in 1916, when Hitler was still an infantryman in the Royal Bavarian Army. The idea that scientists toiled in unspoiled innocence before the rise of fascism would have come as news to anyone slain by machine guns or tanks or poison gas on the battlefields of the Great War. Nor is it the case that all nuclear scientists merely reacted to the advance of fascism from the outside, as it were. Close tends to downplay the actions of scientists who did collaborate actively with fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. Least excusable is Close's refusal to acknowledge the well-documented fascist and anti-Semitic convictions of Ettore Majorana, a theoretical physicist who collaborated with Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi. Close is enchanted by tales of the enigmatic Majorana's superlative genius, despite his sparse publication record, as well as the mystery of his unsolved disappearance in 1938. He suggests that while visiting Werner Heisenberg in Germany in 1933, Majorana 'had a political awakening as he experienced with horror the Nazis seizing power'. There is no citation for this claim, and I doubt that one could be provided. Majorana did write to his mother from Germany describing the Nazi persecution of communists and Jews, but he argued that this policy 'responds to a historical necessity'. He joined the Italian fascist party after his return from Germany and wrote positively about Hitler to the son of the Italian fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile. Fermi, whose wife was Jewish, did eventually leave fascist Italy after Mussolini officially allied with Nazi Germany and enacted a state policy of anti-Semitism. He was one of many refugees from the fascist nations who eventually joined the Manhattan Project, a fact that Close underscores many times. 'It is ironic that Hitler's actions were providing the Allies with the very scientists who would help defeat the Axis powers,' Close remarks. 'Having fled fascism, they would later play central scientific roles in plotting its downfall,' he writes elsewhere. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe This would indeed be a pleasing irony if it were true, but it isn't. The Manhattan Project self-evidently played no role whatsoever in the defeat of Hitler. The atomic bomb did, of course, bring the fight against Japan to an end, but even those who defend the decision to use the bomb would concede that the ultimate outcome of the war was by that time no longer in doubt. While one might sympathise with the scientists who initially joined the Manhattan Project because they believed it was essential to beat Hitler to the bomb, it was already obvious by the end of 1944 – many months before the Trinity nuclear test detonation – that even if the Nazis had managed to figure out a functional design, there was no way they could possibly enrich enough uranium to construct a bomb before their inevitable defeat. At that point, however, only a single scientist left the Manhattan Project: Joseph Rotblat, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize for his disarmament work. Close discusses Rotblat's advocacy in a brief postscript, along with the work of Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, who helped the Soviet Union develop a hydrogen bomb but later also won a Nobel prize for his peace activism. (The postscript also includes, for some reason, the German chemist Otto Hahn, whose failed work for Hitler's nuclear programme during the war did not manage to win him a Nobel Peace Prize.) Close is correct that Rotblat and Sakharov are inspiring. But they are more than that: they exemplify the obligations of any scientist who helps create world-destroying technology. By entering the political fray, they were not going above and beyond the call of duty, helping the public clean up the mess it had made of their discoveries. They were atoning. Tim Gregory, for his part, thinks that nuclear science has precious little to atone for. He begins with a much breezier tour of the same scientific history that Close recounts, before reaching a similar conclusion: 'It just so happened that nuclear physics reached the brink of Promethean knowledge as war broke out in Europe.' For this reason, he feels, it is a bit unfair that nuclear weapons get brought up so often in discussions about what he really wants to celebrate, which is nuclear energy ('not the same thing'). Gregory does concede that nuclear bombs are unpleasant and that it would be quite unfortunate if the world's superpowers began to lob them at each other, but he has no doubt that 'developing the atomic bomb in the first place was necessary', since it was a 'race between the USA and Nazi Germany' and we can be 'glad the Americans won'. In fact, the Americans did no such thing. By the time of the Trinity test, the race really was over; Hitler's nuclear scientists had been in Allied captivity for over two months. Gregory hails the cessation of atmospheric nuclear testing in the early 1960s, although it is not entirely clear why, since he claims that the 'increase in background radiation' wrought by nuclear fallout around the globe was 'harmless'. This verdict is consistent with Gregory's overall position that radioactivity is generally much less hazardous to human health than we ordinarily suppose – a claim whose denial Gregory christens 'radiophobia'. In reality, there is expert consensus that atmospheric nuclear testing was responsible for, at minimum, tens of thousands of cancer cases in the US alone, since fallout did not merely settle in an innocuous even layer around the globe; it was more acutely concentrated in communities near testing sites. This omission makes it more difficult to marvel along with Gregory at the way the chemical signature of the spike and slow decline of radioactive isotopes in the atmosphere in the second half of the 20th century 'helps in the fight against wine forgeries'. Stories about such creative applications of nuclear technology – some of which, especially in medicine, really are astounding in their ingenuity and lifesaving potential – fill the last chapters of Going Nuclear. But most of the book is dedicated to Gregory's case for why nuclear energy, and only nuclear energy, can solve climate change. Gregory hits all the standard pro-nuclear talking points: renewable sources simply can't meet the world's energy needs, especially if the economic development of the Global South is to continue; safety concerns are overblown and rely on isolated horror stories, like Chernobyl, that don't reflect the industry's current standards and track record; if there were only the political will, we could adopt new technology that enables the recycling of nuclear fuel on a widespread scale, obviating worries about uranium scarcity. 'The hysterical opposition to nuclear power,' Gregory concludes, 'ruins our best shot at renouncing fossil fuels before 2050.' Gregory does himself a rhetorical disservice with this tone. Nuclear energy sceptics, many of them both thoughtful and highly credentialed, have replied cogently to previous iterations of all these assertions. Rather than engaging with their claims seriously, even if to ultimately reject them, Gregory instead dismisses nearly everyone who disagrees with him as stupid, mendacious, or simply deranged by 'radiophobia'. At other points it feels like he is trying to conceal the gaps in his arguments by bombarding readers with a flurry of facts and figures. He performs a series of calculations showing that the world's known reserves of uranium could power the planet entirely on nuclear energy, using conventional reactors, for about eight years. State-of-the-art technology mainly in operation today in France could stretch us to a decade, and new 'fast reactors' would make the supply last for 440 years. But the latter technology, by Gregory's own admission, 'never truly made it beyond the prototype phase' until recently. In other words, the hope of powering the entire world on nuclear energy sustainably rests on nascent technology that has never been commercialised on a large scale. The reason it hasn't is not especially mysterious. 'Most of the cost of nuclear electricity', as Gregory observes, comes from 'the up-front cost of building power stations', which is enormous. Gregory bemoans 'today's climate of short-sightedness', since 'epic nuclear programmes take time'. That is surely true. But short-sightedness is not just a mindset problem with which we happen to be afflicted right now; it is a structural feature of our political-economic order. Private capital has little incentive to shoulder colossal short-term costs in the hope – no more than that, since the technology involved is unproven – of long-term repayment, when so many opportunities for short-term profit, juicing share prices and financing executive bonuses, still abound. It is no coincidence that the few nations that Gregory celebrates for their adventurous nuclear programmes have a long history of state economic leadership, such as France, China and the Nordic social democracies. But Gregory prefers nuclear energy to renewables precisely because it seems better suited to preserving the economic status quo. He finds an elective affinity between enthusiasm for renewables and the desire to ''de-grow' our economies and debase our living standards in the name of environmental protection', a vision which he rejects unequivocally. Gregory, in contrast, sees nuclear energy as the heart of an environmentalism committed to the values of 'wealth, prosperity and energy abundance'. Empowering the state at the expense of capital need not spell an end to wealth and prosperity, but Gregory does not seem to recognise that actualising his nuclear dreams worldwide would require radical political-economic change. He asserts, for instance, that 'private sector entrepreneurship' will be essential to the widespread adoption of 'fast reactors'. From the Manhattan Project to the present, it is hard to think of a force that has contributed less to the development of nuclear power. The spectre of Christopher Nolan's 2023 blockbuster Oppenheimer haunts both Destroyer of Worlds and Going Nuclear. Close writes about Robert Oppenheimer's reputation as 'the father of the atomic bomb' with palpable frustration; he considers the moniker 'wrong on many fronts'. The first time he remarks on Oppenheimer's chain smoking it adds colour; the second time it feels petty. Gregory, for his part, frames his account of the history of nuclear science by repeating almost verbatim and without attribution the opening text of Nolan's film: 'Prometheus wrested fire from the Olympian gods and gave it to humankind.' He omits the next bit, about being punished for all eternity. It is easy to understand why nuclear scientists might regret that the most iconic image of their guild is now Cillian Murphy's dismayed face in close-up, contemplating the end of the world. But this image became iconic because the sight of a scientist displaying real moral and political seriousness, even in fictionalised form, has become all too rare. We hunger for scientists who recognise that they exist within the same webs of interdependent responsibility in which we are all enmeshed. 'I'm going back to the lab now,' Gregory writes at the end of Going Nuclear. 'Over to you.' Prometheus had more solidarity with the recipients of his ambiguous gifts. Erik Baker teaches the history of science at Harvard University and is the author of 'Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America' Going Nuclear Tim Gregory Bodley Head, 384pp, £25 Destroyer of Worlds Frank Close Allen Lane, £25, 336pp Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Palestine Action and the distortion of terrorism] Related This article appears in the 07 Aug 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2025
Economist
06-08-2025
- Economist
Astronomers cannot agree on how fast the universe is expanding
IT IS ONE of the biggest mysteries in cosmology—and getting bigger all the time. Ever since Edwin Hubble, an American astronomer, published observations of distant galaxies in 1929, scientists have known that the universe is expanding. For almost 30 years they have known that the expansion is accelerating (that discovery, made in 1998, was honoured with a Nobel prize in 2011). What they cannot agree on, though, is how fast it is currently growing.
Times
06-08-2025
- Times
How Times readers debated the morality of the Hiroshima bomb
The letters page of The Times on August 8, 1945 was, as ever, eclectic. There was a letter praising midwives. There was another discussing which clergy should sit in the House of Lords. Then, just before resuming a long-running correspondence about postwar forestry, the editor found space to moot the possibility of the apocalypse. Sir Henry Dale, a winner of the Nobel prize for physiology and medicine, confessed that he was worried about whether the bomb just dropped on Hiroshima was a portent of the end of humanity. 'Science, an unwilling conscript, has become the direct agent of undiscriminating devastation at long range,' wrote Dale, the president of the Royal Society. With atomic power, he said, came tremendous opportunities, but also 'the threat of final disaster to civilisation '.
