Editorial Roundup: United States

Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad: ___ Oct. 11 The Washington Post on AI's impact on chemistry, biomedicine One of this year’s Nobel Prize winners in physics, Geoffrey Hinton, who pioneered work on the neural networks that undergird artificial intelligence, has warned that machines might someday get smarter than humans. Perhaps. But this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry honored a real-world example of how AI is helping humans today with astounding discoveries in protein structure that have far-reaching applications. This is a development worth savoring. Proteins are biology’s lead actors. As the Nobel committee pointed out, proteins “control and drive all the chemi­cal reactions that together are the basis of life. Proteins also function as hormones, signal substances, antibodies and the building blocks of different tissues.” In the human body, they are necessary for the structure, function and regulation of tissues and organs. All proteins begin with...