Harry J Barraza

Open Innovation practitioner, interested in all things future tech, complexity and biosemiotics. Retweets do not imply endorsement, just interest.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A British kid became a chess master at 13, then a bestselling video game designer at 17, then a PhD neuroscientist at 33, then the CEO of the AI lab that won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

People called him unfocused for twenty years. He was running the most deliberate career plan in modern science.

His name is Demis Hassabis, and the thing almost nobody understood while he was doing it was that every single step was feeding the same underlying obsession.

Here is the thread that connects the whole career, and why it matters for how anyone should think about building toward a hard goal.

The chess came first. He was born in London in 1976 and started playing at age four. By eight, he was the London champion for his age group. By thirteen, he had an international master rating that put him in the top fifty players in the world under his age bracket. He was on a track that would have made him a professional player for the rest of his life.

He walked away.

The reason he gave later, in interview after interview, is the part most people miss. He said chess forced him to think constantly about thinking itself. Every move required him to simulate what his opponent was simulating about him. He became fascinated not with winning the game, but with the process the human brain was running in order to play it. He decided chess was too small a container for the real question he wanted to answer, which was how intelligence actually works.

The video games came next. He used the money he won from chess tournaments to buy a ZX Spectrum. He taught himself to code. By seventeen, he was a lead programmer on a game called Theme Park that sold millions of copies. He could have stayed in that industry and built a career as one of the top game designers in Britain.

He walked away from that too.

He went to Cambridge, did a double first in computer science, and then made the move that looked like the strangest pivot of his life. He enrolled in a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London. He was thirty. His peers from Cambridge were already running companies. He went back to graduate school to study how the human hippocampus builds memories and imagines future scenarios.

His 2007 paper on the link between memory and imagination was named one of the top ten scientific breakthroughs of the year by Science magazine. But the paper was never the point. The point was that he had spent three decades quietly building the exact combination of skills nobody else in the world had put together.

Deep intuition for how intelligent agents behave in complex systems, from a lifetime of chess. Hands-on engineering fluency, from years of shipping commercial software. And a rigorous scientific understanding of how biological brains actually produce cognition, from a PhD in neuroscience.

In 2010, he used that combination to co-found DeepMind with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. The mission statement he wrote was two sentences long and sounded absurd to most people who heard it. Solve intelligence. Then use it to solve everything else.

For the first six years, DeepMind worked almost entirely on games. Atari. StarCraft. Go. People outside the field could not understand why a lab that claimed to be building artificial general intelligence was spending hundreds of millions of dollars teaching computers to play Pong.

Hassabis kept explaining the reason in interviews and almost nobody was listening. Games were not the goal. Games were a controlled environment where you could iterate on general-purpose learning algorithms fast, measure their progress precisely, and prove to yourself that you had built something that could transfer between domains.

In 2016, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, the world champion at Go, in a match that had been considered decades away. And the day after that match ended, Hassabis sat down with his team lead David Silver and asked what they should do next.

The answer was the thing he had been working toward his entire life.

They turned the same deep reinforcement learning approach at a problem biology had been stuck on for fifty years. Protein folding. Given an amino acid sequence, predict the three-dimensional shape the protein would fold into. Every drug discovery effort in the world depended on it. The best computational methods could only solve a small fraction of proteins. Experimental methods took years per structure and millions of dollars per protein.

AlphaFold2 was released in 2020. Within a year, it had predicted the structure of almost every protein known to science. Two hundred million structures. Made freely available to the entire research community. More than two million researchers from a hundred and ninety countries have used it since.

In October 2024, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that work.

The line almost nobody quotes from his speeches is the one that explains the whole career. He has said, many times, that he did not build AlphaFold to solve protein folding. He built AlphaFold to prove that the approach he had been developing for thirty years could actually work on a real scientific problem. Protein folding was the demonstration. AGI was always the goal.

The chess taught him how to think about adversarial systems. The games taught him how to ship software. The neuroscience taught him how the only existing example of general intelligence actually worked. DeepMind used all three to build a method that could transfer between domains the way the human brain does. And the moment the method was ready, he pointed it at the single most important unsolved problem he could find in a domain where a breakthrough would save millions of lives.

Most people looking at his career from the outside, at any point before 2016, would have called it scattered. A chess prodigy who gave up chess. A video game designer who walked away from a gaming career. A computer scientist who detoured through neuroscience. A startup founder who burned six years on board games.

From the inside, it was the most focused career in modern science. Every step was quietly answering the same question. How does intelligence actually work, and what would it take to build one that could solve problems humans have not been able to solve alone.

The people who change a field are almost never the ones who looked focused along the way.

They are the ones who were obsessed with a single question so deep and so long that the path they took to answer it looked like chaos from the outside and like a straight line from the inside.

And they almost never get credit for the plan until decades later, when the Nobel Committee calls.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Fertilization is not random, and the fastest sperm does not always win: in reality, the egg decides who succeeds.

While for decades we were taught that fertilization is a race won by the fastest sperm, a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows how human reproduction actually works.

Scientists analyzed follicular fluid from 60 couples undergoing fertility treatment at St Mary's Hospital in Manchester, UK. They discovered that the egg releases chemical signals (chemoattractants) that actively attract sperm from certain men over others.

Through these chemical signals, the egg exerts its own biological selection, influencing which sperm manage to get close. The egg appears to favor sperm that offer optimal genetic compatibility with its own genome — particularly in genes related to the immune system — which may help produce healthier offspring.

Interestingly, this cellular preference does not always align with the couple’s conscious partner choice. In many cases, eggs showed stronger attraction to sperm from non-partner males.

This chemical communication demonstrates that female biology continues to evaluate and select options even after intercourse. Understanding this process could lead to more precise solutions for unexplained infertility. Science continues to reveal the remarkable level of biological interaction that occurs during reproduction.

[Fitzpatrick, J. L. et al. (2020). Chemical signals from eggs facilitate cryptic female choice in humans. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 287(1928), 20200805. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2020.0805]

[Harry J Barraza @harrybarraza]

Leading University of Portsmouth physicist’s study indicates that gravity or gravitational force is the result of a computational process within the univer…

Source: University of Portsmouth
Shared via the Google app https://t.co/RqtvpWn2Yu

[Harry J Barraza @harrybarraza]

Why are women so unromantic? https://t.co/A2s3Ud0npf

[Materials World @materialsworld]

A blueprint for #materials:
@RoyceInstitute releases a National Materials #Innovation Strategy.

Read full article here: https://t.co/M1dLHSULUP

[Roger Highfield @RogerHighfield]

On Tuesday 15 October at 10.15am @LordsSTCom hears from @SciTechgovuk minister, Lord Vallance.

⬇️ Watch live on X

https://t.co/TS0Xm2tmIU

[Harry J Barraza @harrybarraza]

Do you remember when you joined X? I do! #MyXAnniversary

[Food Science and Nutrition at Leeds @FoodSciLeeds]

The National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre (NAPIC) is announced today, with £38m support by @BBSRC, @innovateuk and partners.

The innovative centre will develop tasty, affordable, sustainable and healthy alternatives to animal proteins.

https://t.co/Zs9Fov1Xy1

[Harry J Barraza @harrybarraza]

Great read: Une vie d’amour, by @MarieDOLLE https://t.co/qpxXmhJ0kE

[UK NML ChemBio&GC @NML_ChemBioGC]

We are thrilled to share the appointment of Dr Zahra Rattray as NML Academic in Residence at the @UniStrathclyde.

Find out more about this partnership- https://t.co/54unXmNS7H #Partnership #measurement #pharmaceutical

[Harry J Barraza @harrybarraza]

Stoicism is back https://t.co/pRNH9TuSWC

[Harry J Barraza @harrybarraza]

@LippyLiptrott @LivUniISMIB @_AndrewOwen_ Way to go! Congrats !

[Professor Katy Shaw @ProfKatyShaw]

NEW: Devolution Revolution - the role of universities in the rise of the regions and nations 💪🏻

My ⁦@timeshighered⁩ piece out today ahead of my talk at #THELiveUKIE in Liverpool 👍🏻
⁦@NorthTyneCA⁩ ⁦@NorthumbriaUni⁩ ⁦@ahrcpress⁩ https://t.co/m9VzOUtgzj

[Health Innovation Leeds @HealthInnLeeds]

The Northern Cell Metrology Hub joined @nexusunileeds as a #medtech centre of #innovation. Here we explore why #Leeds is the perfect location for one of the most diversely equipped #cell measurement labs in the world - https://t.co/bMvZdDrerx. @NML_ChemBioGC

#HealthInnLeeds

[David R. Liu @davidrliu]

In a major milestone for science, for medicine, and for patients, the world’s first CRISPR drug has been approved in the UK.
“A new treatment for sickle-cell disease and transfusion-dependent β-thalassemia has been authorised by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) for patients aged 12 and over after a rigorous assessment of its safety, quality and effectiveness.”
Congratulations to the many scientists, doctors, patients, and industry leaders who made this development possible.🍻
https://t.co/pUL956YsG3

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

Just a few simplified population distribution maps. Do you recognize all countries based on their shape alone?

[UK NML ChemBio&GC @NML_ChemBioGC]

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Healthcare Scientist (#HCS) Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) Programme 📷

For more information and how to apply- https://t.co/lmBITvr7EE #HCSKTP #knowledgetransfer

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

The discoveries by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman – awarded the 2023 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine – were critical for developing effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 during the pandemic that began in early 2020.

Through their groundbreaking findings, this year’s laureates have fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system. They have contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.

[Harry J Barraza @harrybarraza]

@DuncanGraham70 @ariannaleventi @Howbeer @EwenSmith5 @NML_ChemBioGC @StrathChem @FauldsKaren Congrats, Dr Leventi !!

[UK NML ChemBio&GC @NML_ChemBioGC]

Exciting news! @MicroplateDx, a newly formed spinout company from @UniStrathclyde focused on personalising #antibiotic prescribing, will be moving into the Centre for Advanced Measurement Science and Health Translation, a co-initiative between @UniStrathclyde and NML.