DNA as the molecule of encoding information for heredity is also "merely" a discovery of an ancient biological system. However, it's not as though physics predicts the existence of DNA specifically, or CRISPR, yet these things are important for understanding biology, and in the case of CRISPR it's been turned into a technology that humans can use. Which is why I have a lot of complaints about the commonly held belief such as this one:
> merely be elaborations of basic principles that already exist, rather than elucidations of any as-yet undiscovered principles.
This is not a meaningful or thoughtful examination of even chemistry. 3D structure of proteins is "merely" an elaboration of physical properties, yet "physics" doesn't have the tools to make much progress on solving the 3D structure of a sequence of amino acids, despite it being a purely physics process.
Is the world "physical" in the sense that probably don't have new fundamental forces of nature? Of course. That doesn't mean that physics helps understand much of the physical world, because the "elaboration" in the "merely elaboration" has nothing to do what physicists or other scientists consider "physics."
No, the elucidation of the structure of the DNA isn't just merely a discovery of an ancient biological system. It was the recognition that the structure was formed by antiparallel strands encoding information in a reversible molecular form, that represents a real level-up in human understanding of the universe. That's the whole point of that throwaway sentence at the end "It has not escaped our notice (12) that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."
Also, we can simulate protein folding well enough from classical physics and quantum approximations such that "rapid two-state folders" are considered solved. That was a major outcome in the course of my career, to which I contributed significantly :)
If we can simulate protein folding well enough, why was the Google announcement last year such a big deal?
I worked in protein folding over 30 years ago at EMBL, and have loosely followed it since. I could easily have been led astray, but I was absolutely not under the impression that we can do this even close to "well enough".
I work at Google and did protein folding before the Deepmind (not Google) announcement.
The CASP results weren't really a big deal. It was a modest advancement using techniques that were already spreading throughout the community, coupled with a skilled team that understood the score metric very well.
Two state folders can be reversibly folded using empirically determined force fields (two state folders basically go from "any totally unfolded configuration" to "fully folded single structure" in milliseconds); we can just run simulations and let the (quantum-inspired, classically embedded) physics do the folding, or we can use other techniques, like Rosetta (monte carlo plus lots of empirical data from known structures), or evolutionary data-based techniques (like Deepmind and others used).
If I'm filling in the blanks here correctly, what we're still far away from is determining the folded configuration of an arbitrary polypeptide. Is that correct? Or has there been real breakthroughs there? 10 years ago when I last checked in with some folk I knew from EMBL, this still seemed to be a complete pipedream.
Is there a paper that describes the parameters of the peptide structure that go into the "physics do the folding" part? When I was at EMBL, I was focused on using local hydrophobicity to see how predictive it was (not at all). Is the physics model operating at this level, above it, or below it?
> merely be elaborations of basic principles that already exist, rather than elucidations of any as-yet undiscovered principles.
This is not a meaningful or thoughtful examination of even chemistry. 3D structure of proteins is "merely" an elaboration of physical properties, yet "physics" doesn't have the tools to make much progress on solving the 3D structure of a sequence of amino acids, despite it being a purely physics process.
Is the world "physical" in the sense that probably don't have new fundamental forces of nature? Of course. That doesn't mean that physics helps understand much of the physical world, because the "elaboration" in the "merely elaboration" has nothing to do what physicists or other scientists consider "physics."