5 ms·
This ties back into AI, too, right? I always like to bring up how many decades of research, how many hundreds of years of entire PhD-theses, how many sleepless
by a_bonobo 8d ago
This ties back into AI, too, right?
I always like to bring up how many decades of research, how many hundreds of years of entire PhD-theses, how many sleepless nights were used up to generate all the protein structure data that made up the corpus of Protein Data Bank - that was then hovered up by the AlphaFold team, and guess who got the Nobel Prize...
- dekhn 7d agoIndividual crystal structures, while heroic, probably don't qualify for the Nobel Prize (the only counterexample that I can think of is the crystal structure of the ribosome, which finally demonstrated that the active site was RNA, not protein). And don't forget that AlphaFold worked because of sequence data (similarly laboriously collected by a large number of people). A big part of the problem is that we award prizes to the small number of people who do something first, or who were in charge- the LIGO NP should have been awarded to the entire consortium, not Kip Thorne and a couple other people under this logic.
- teiferer 8d agoJust like all non-AI related nobel prizes before them. Every laureate stands on the shoulder of giants which is their field as a generations-spanning body of researchers. They did the last step and get recognized. The good ones acknowledge that in their acceptance speeches.