How did AlphaFold transition from a theoretical grand challenge into a Nobel Prize-winning achievement?

Protein folding stood as a fifty-year grand challenge in molecular biology, with experimental crystallography requiring years of manual laboratory work for a single structure. By combining deep learning with physical and evolutionary constraints, AlphaFold predicted the structures of over two hundred million proteins in months. We released the entire database freely to the scientific world, empowering millions of researchers to accelerate medicine, enzyme design, and plastic bioremediation.