"This is interesting from a technology perspective, perhaps, but it's hard to call it science."
As a physicist and scientist myself, I feel extremely inclined to say 'potato, potahto' at this one. This technology allows us to test many more hypotheses at a much quicker pace, which is good enough for me to call it science.
This technology allows us to test many more hypotheses at a much quicker pace"
I think you're seriously overestimating the quality of the model. This isn't particle physics -- it's not as if there's an equation that precisely predicts the results of any particular molecular interaction. We don't even know if we know the full set of possible interactions in a system of this size. How can we possibly simulate it?
This is an example of "we ran the fancy machine for a while, it spit out some data, and we cherry-picked 'interesting' results from the output. Some of them even show up in experiments!" These sorts of breathless announcements are common in computational biology, but they usually don't amount to much. The best work is extremely reductionist. As others have already noted, it's easy to spend 10x the computational resources simulating a single protein on timescales far, far shorter than the ones simulated here.
"I think you're seriously overestimating the quality of the model. This isn't particle physics -- it's not as if there's an equation that precisely predicts the results of any particular molecular interaction. We don't even know if we know the full set of possible interactions in a system of this size. How can we possibly simulate it?"
(Edit: there was a whole bunch of stuff here, but it's pretty much irrelevant given that we seem to agree on the basic points.)
"This is an example of "we ran the fancy machine for a while, it spit out some data, and we cherry-picked 'interesting' results from the output. Some of them even show up in experiments!" These sorts of breathless announcements are common in computational biology, but they usually don't amount to much. The best work is extremely reductionist. As others have already noted, it's easy to spend 10x the computational resources simulating a single protein on timescales far, far shorter than the ones simulated here."
That's fair enough. I checked your profile and saw that you have a PhD in computational biology, which is not my field of expertise, so I'm inclined to take your word on that one. In that case, my comments do, of course, not apply.
But the hypothesis is being tested against the model and not against reality. The model can help to indicate the result but in my opinion it's not scientific advance until tested against reality.
Now there may be a question as to whether we can ever truly test a hypothesis against reality or if we're stuck with models ...
As a physicist and scientist myself, I feel extremely inclined to say 'potato, potahto' at this one. This technology allows us to test many more hypotheses at a much quicker pace, which is good enough for me to call it science.