01 原文阅读 
826words(不包括标题)
本文选自经济学人20210731期Leaders版块
Biological origami
Proteinotopia
Remarkable progress in understanding the folding of proteins will help open up almost limitless vistas
When st john the evangelist wrote of the Word becoming Flesh, he was drawing on ideas of reason and order derived from classical Greek philosophy. But he was also providing a succinct description of the most basic truth in molecular biology. In a wonderful and ancient mechanism called the ribosome, words—in the form of messages stored in dna—are translated into flesh, in the form of proteins.
Proteins are flesh both literally, in that they give meat the texture and bloodiness that carnivores savour, and figuratively, in that their actions lie behind all the strengths and frailties of body and mind. Both their manipulation and their mass production are fundamental to modern pharmacology. The huge market for statins rests on the way they interact with the workings of a protein called hmg-coa reductase; Keytruda, the world’s biggest-selling cancer drug, is a protein itself, a subtly tweaked antibody which turns off a mechanism that lets cancers evade the immune system. Understanding the form and function of proteins is crucial to medicine, to agriculture and to replacing the petrochemicals currently produced from oil. And that understanding is fast deepening.
Proteins are created as chains of smaller molecules called amino acids. The ribosome can fill each link in the chain with one of 20 different varieties of them. The words stored in dna set out which of those 20 types of amino acid goes where. The process is explained in this week’s “Biology brief”, the first of six.
In order to take on the shape required of it, a protein must fold itself up into a specific form, a process which produces all manner of kinks, twists,  swirls,  sheets and cavities. The shape depends on the amino-acid sequence, but the interactions between the hundreds of amino acids are just too complex for the sequence alone to reveal much. To understand the structure of a protein in detail, scientists have had to make comparatively large amounts of it, coax those molecules into forming a crystal (or, more recently, flash-freeze them) and bombard the sample with x-rays (or, if it is a frozenone, electrons). These procedures take time, money and effort. Only a tiny fraction of the proteins whose sequences are known have been studied this way.
Now things look likely to get considerably easier. AlphaFold, a very elegant piece of software developed by DeepMind, a British ai company, has learned from the detailed study of sequence and structure to make predictions of protein shapes using just the amino-acid sequences of their very bendy backbones. On July 22nd DeepMind, which, like Google, is owned by Alphabet, made 350,000 of its predictions freely available to all, having released the code the week before. Millions more such predictions are expected soon.
As those suspicious of hype rightly point out, not all of these will be equally good and better prediction does not do away with the need for other ways of exploring protein structure. AlphaFold will not be the last word in the application of ai to the problem. All that said, the software looks likely to be massively useful, helping researchers spot possibilities and dead ends more quickly and letting them take on projects they would otherwise have steered clear of. If AlphaFold is not soon providing useful pharmacological results, as well as lots of basic biology, it will not be for want of application.
AlphaFold will also help usher in an era of altogether stranger things. Proteins are typically made from 20 different amino acids, each of which can, in principle, sit at any point in the chain. With 20 choices as to what should follow the first amino acid, you have 20x20=400 possible amino-acid doublets, 20x20x20=8,000 triplets and so on. By the time you get to an eight-amino-acid chain, there are more possibilities than there are people on Earth. Human proteins are typically 400 amino acids long; many have lengths in the thousands. There is no type of physical thing in the observable universe remotely as numerous as the possibilities inherent in a 400-amino-acid protein.
The “potential protein space” such calculations reveal is thus a cosmos unto itself, ordered yet near infinite. The bit that evolution has explored so far—which contains wonders as diverse as proteins that flex like springs, spin like wheels, extend like pistons and crank like ratchets, that turn sunlight into chemical energy, that build, demolish and recycle all the components of life and do more besides—is but the tiniest corner of it. Already some scientists are working on “de novo” proteins well outside nature’s comfort zone as ways of making tiny mechanisms and machines. As tools like AlphaFold increase the ease of molecular design, they will be joined by many more.
Compared with the designs evolution has honed over billions of years such things as this will be the crudest of toys, at least to begin with. But who can say what new flesh the designers’ words will eventually bring into being?
译文更新地点(新公众号):
译文更新时间:
下午5点新公众号《一天一篇外刊翻译》更新译文,大家可以先看原文,自己翻译练习下,下午再对比下。

02 免费外刊分享群

后台总是有小伙伴私信小编要外刊,小编虽然已经发过多次推文,例如
获取经济学人的N种方法如何在官网半价订阅经济学人,讲过了这么多方法,但还是有辣么多小伙伴不会或者懒得弄。小编建过很多群,每次群不到两小时都爆满了,这次再次建了群,小编会每周在群里分享外刊,有兴趣的小伙伴扫码进群(已经加入公众号其他群的小伙伴请不要重复加群),谢谢。进群广告者一律踢,不接受任何解释,谢谢理解。
扫以下二维码进群:
大家先看看今天分享的都是哪些外刊,如下图所示
每天还会分享the world in brief,China daily等等
特别注意:
如果大家想获取
2001-2021年所有的经济学人PDF,请按照以下操作:
1. 转发本文到朋友圈全部可见或 100人以上英语微信群(一天一篇经济学人社群除外)
2. 转发后两小时截图私信小编396196827,小编会在晚上通过(白天在工地),通过后发给您,谢谢理解。
03 我们招人啦

人的一生,会遇到形形色色的人。大多数与你短暂相交,然后渐行渐远。只有极少数能与你走在同一轨道。我们寻找的是这个极少数同频同轨的小伙伴。
请大家一定仔细阅读下推文我们招人啦!满足条件再加小编,设置严格的条件,只是希望能保证译文质量,对30w+读者负责!
---END---
继续阅读
阅读原文