Legendary AlphaFold Team Disbanded: Nobel Laureate Joins Anthropic, Resources Shift to Gemini

According to the Financial Times, Google DeepMind has dissolved the AlphaFold team that solved the protein structure prediction problem and produced Nobel laureates. Team members have been redirected to various internal projects: some to Gemini and AI coding, others to genomics, protein and enzyme design, and nuclear fusion. A portion moved to Alphabet's drug discovery company Isomorphic Labs, while several key researchers, including Nobel laureate John Jumper, Jonas Adler, and Alexander Pritzel, left for Anthropic. Google Cloud Chief Scientist Pushmeet Kohli stated that the science team is not pivoting but expanding its scope to include protein function, genomics, enzyme design, and Gemini-powered scientific agents. DeepMind is now betting on a model where Gemini serves as a foundation for multiple scientific projects, rather than maintaining a single dedicated team. The move aims to spread AlphaFold's accumulated expertise across more scientific domains, but raises questions about whether such a platform can replicate the focused, long-term research that led to AlphaFold's breakthrough.