Posted by artninja1988 2 days ago
Edit: A true expert would never define a problem in such a sloppy way: "Specifically, the protein must convert N₂ to ammonia at rates that are at least of a similar order of magnitude to the rates of naturally occurring proteins, and must fall well below the sequence- and structure-similarity thresholds relative to all known nitrogenase and nitrogenase-like proteins. The protein may be designed de novo, discovered in nature, or engineered or evolved from naturally occurring starting points."
EDISON SCIENTIFIC · FUTUREHOUSE
SAM RODRIQUES · MICHAELA HINKS
It seems that understanding biology could be characterized as trying to figure out "how did nature engineer this".
For that matter isn't all of science this way?
You keep on making assertions - perhaps you could back it up with some explanation of why you regard this as a more fundamental discovery (or however you would like to characterize it)?
That is not engineering. Nobody would call astronomy or cosmology engineering and it is very much the study of "how the universe is built from some basic building blocks.
Don't assign a reductive meaning to engineering that is so encompassing that everything everywhere is engineering, else you render "engineering" a meaningless concept
Rodriques is CEO of Edison scientific, which is going all in on agentic biology. These problems are all benchmarkable, and have been selected to allow for agentic exploration. That is, the tool is driving the problem selection more than genuine value to the field in solving these problems.
Still, if someone takes any of this up and manages something, it’ll be cool.