The Peabody Museum

During my time at Yale, I visited The Human Footprint exhibit at the Yale Peabody Museum. The exhibit focuses on how humans and their environment have shaped each other over millions of years. It presents human evolution as a complicated process involving many species, tools, environments, and extinctions. The gallery has replicas of early human fossils and animals our ancestors interacted with. Human evolution isn’t a linear process, it’s composed of many different adaptations appearing in response to our environments.

One part of the exhibit that stood out to me was how much scientists could learn from physical evidence. A skull or tool may seem small, but the details reveal how ancient humans lived. Early human relatives developed traits like walking upright, making tools, and having larger brains, but these adaptations did not appear at the same time. The stone tools were especially interesting because they showed that technology has been part of human survival for millions of years. Today, technology is represented by phones or AI, but the earliest technology was a sharpened stone. Technology has always been a way humans adapt.

The Human Footprint also showed that survival was never guaranteed. Some human relatives lived for millenia but eventually died out. A trait can be useful in one environment but when conditions change, that trait can be disadvantageous. The exhibit connects this idea to the present by diving deeper into how humans are still changing the world. The gallery includes examples like humans contributing to the extinction of giant moa and agriculture changing the genetics of corn. Visiting the exhibit helped me understand human evolution as a story of adaptation to environments. Like Darwin’s observations of small differences in organisms, the exhibit showed that science begins with paying attention to details. 

The Thinking Game

While at Yale Young Global Scholars, I watched the documentary The Thinking Game, which follows Demis Hassabis and DeepMind as they progressed towards breakthroughs in AI. One of the biggest challenges Hassabis and his team encountered was protein-folding. Their solution, AlphaFold, revolutionized research. Scientists went from having a handful of reliable models of proteins to having access to models of every protein imaginable. 

This documentary was especially interesting because I had used AlphaFold before in my own research. I studied the evolutionary relationships between Dipcericin A, Diptericin B, and Diptericin C using phylogenetic trees, and AlphaFold modeling. Before doing this research, I mostly thought of biology and computer science as fields that barely overlapped. However, watching this movie and conducting my own research has taught me that those two fields often help the other advance. In this case, AI transformed research permanently and for the better. 

Research is becoming more interdisciplinary. Biology, computer science, artificial intelligence, and statistics are no longer completely separate fields. In order to study peptides, I utilized programming and AI. Future research will depend on people who can connect different areas of knowledge and scientists will need to understand not only the organism or molecule they are studying, but also the technology being used to study it.

The Thinking Game showed me that AlphaFold represents a larger shift in how scientific research is done. My own project on Diptericin showed me a small example of that shift. By combining biology with technology, I was able to study insect immune peptides in a way that would have been much harder without computational tools. Discoveries like AlphaFold are not just impressive because they use AI, but because they help scientists ask deeper questions about life, evolution, and the structures that make biology possible.