72 | David Baker and the lab's communal brain

Listen to this episode from Night Science on Spotify. David Baker, who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for designing novel proteins with AI, is a professor at the University of Washington. In this episode, he explains how he socially engineers his lab’s "communal brain", where all individuals function like neurons, densely interconnected to maximize idea generation. We explore the role of AI in science, discussing whether AI can be truly creative. Finally, we discuss the current funding crisis in science, which disproportionately affects young researchers.For more information about Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .