July 29, 2026
Folded, shelved, and roasted
Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
Google’s Nobel-winning science team gets split up — and commenters are asking if the big breakthrough is basically done
TLDR: Google has broken up much of the Nobel-winning AlphaFold team and shifted people to other projects, especially Gemini. In the comments, readers are split between “mission accomplished” and “why is Google sidelining major science for the AI hype race?”
Google isn’t deleting AlphaFold, the famous DeepMind project that helped scientists predict protein shapes and even scored a Nobel Prize. But the team behind it is being scattered: some people were moved to Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence push, others went to Alphabet’s drug company Isomorphic Labs, and a few high-profile names have flat-out left — including John Jumper, who’s heading to Anthropic. That alone was enough to make commenters clutch their lab coats.
But the real action was in the reaction thread, where the mood was less “RIP science” and more “Wait, is this just what happens after you win?” One camp basically asked whether the job was mostly finished anyway. If AlphaFold already gave away a free database with more than 200 million protein structure predictions, then, as one commenter put it, is that enough for researchers? Another wondered whether “most of the useful juice had been squeezed” from the project after years of work. In other words: not everyone is buying the shutdown as a tragedy.
Still, there’s a sharp undertone of unease. The subtext in the comments is that Google seems to be pouring everything into the Gemini race, and people are side-eyeing the idea of a Nobel-winning science effort getting broken apart just as the chatbot wars heat up. Even the driest comments carried that classic internet mix of skepticism, resignation, and accidental comedy: is this the natural end of a mission accomplished — or another case of Big Tech dropping science to chase the next shiny thing?
Key Points
- •The Financial Times reported that Google DeepMind has dismantled the core AlphaFold team, with most key members reassigned and some having left the company.
- •AlphaFold, developed starting in 2018, was recognized in 2020 for solving the long-standing protein folding problem by predicting protein 3D structures from amino acid sequences.
- •In 2021, Nature published AlphaFold’s methodology and human proteome predictions, and DeepMind later released the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database with over 200 million predictions.
- •Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold.
- •DeepMind said some former AlphaFold staff were moved to Gemini projects and others to Isomorphic Labs, reflecting a broader shift of Google resources toward Gemini.