In 2023 Baker’s lab released RFdiffusion, which applied the same diffusion-model trick that powers DALL-E and Midjourney to protein design. You give it a target — I want a protein that binds this region of the human EGFR receptor — and it proposes a 3D shape. A second program finds the amino acid sequence that produces that shape. The protein is synthesized within weeks and tested. Success rates went from 1% to over 50%. For the first time in history, designing a protein was easier than building it.