Antibodies are versatile molecular binders with an established and growing role as therapeutics. Computational approaches to developing and designing these molecules are being increasingly used to complement traditional lab-based processes. Nowadays, in silico methods fill multiple elements of the discovery stage, such as characterizing antibody–antigen interactions and identifying developability liabilities. Recently, computational methods tackling such problems have begun to follow machine learning paradigms, in many cases deep learning specifically. This paradigm shift offers improvements in established areas such as structure or binding prediction and opens up new possibilities such as language-based modeling of antibody repertoires or machine-learning-based generation of novel sequences. In this review, we critically examine the recent developments in (deep) machine learning approaches to therapeutic antibody design with implications for fully computational antibody design.
Thomas Pynchon's Gravity 's Rainbow (1973) is a novel informed by many diverse disciplines and cultural texts, among them the German folk tale Hansel and Gretel. This article argues that Pynchon's representation of the fairy tale explicitly refers to its psychoanalytical reading offered by Julius Heuscher in his influential study entitled A Psychiatric Study of Myths and Fairy Tales.1 It is in his most significant rendition of Hansel and Gretel, the Oven game, that Pynchon encapsulates the theme of bad parents and victimized children, a subject elaborated throughout Gravity's Rainbow. Tom LeClair notices that the themes of dominance and victimization, introduced through Pynchon's rendition of the fairy tale, "are some of the essential emotional and narrative coordinates in Gravity's Rainbow."2 The tale's involvement with this topic has been pointed to by other literary critics, who emphasize the Oven's sadomasochistic character as one of the many manifestations of violence in the novel.3 However, no considerable attention has been paid to the motivation behind Pynchon's take on the narrative of Hansel and Gretel. In his essay on the significance of the fairy tale in Gravity's Rainbow, Jean-Marie Léonet argues that Pynchon manipulates the plot of the story "in a way that emphasizes the fundamental change that has occurred in human history,"4 which he considers to have been powered by the introduction of quantum physics and relativity theory.5 My article attempts to explain Pynchon's rendition of the Hansel and Gretel tale in a radically different framework: Teutonic mythology. By locating the fairy tale in the context of the German pagan belief system, with numerous allusions to its heathen gods and goddesses, Pynchon demonstrates the workings of a dominant culture on elements incompatible with its ideology. In Gravity's Rainbow, the misrepresentations of Germanic heathen figures are a direct result of the interactions between Teutonic
Ruth Ozeki structures the narrative of All Over Creation around the cultivation of a transgenic food crop, which provokes a debate exploiting a number of widespread representations of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The article focuses on the anti-GMO rhetoric, which offers a utopian discourse of agriculture clearly embedded within the pastoral convention, with genetic modification techniques represented as an intrusive “machine in the garden” and the mythological figure of the farmer exploited to fit the scope of the American context of the story. Exposing the conventions and mythologies behind the environmentalist narrative against the genetic engineering of plants, Ozeki's text demonstrates how the contrasting anti-GMO utopianism and pro-GMO techno-utopianism are both deeply rooted in the Western tradition, with its cultural and linguistic tendencies to objectify nature and conceptualize it as a female. Examining the value of genetically modified crops to different social groups, Ozeki's narrative accurately represents the complexities surrounding the contemporary practice of agriculture and opens up a discursive space for reformulating the rarely explored human–plant relationship, suggesting that neither kind of utopianism can serve as a conceptual framework for assessing the potential dangers and benefits of the introduction of GMOs into ecosystems and human bodies.
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