Nobel in Chemistry to David Baker, Demis Hassabis, John Jumper for work on proteins

Mangalore Today News Network

Swedan, October 9, 2024: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Wednesday awarded one-half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to David Baker “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction.”

Proteins are large, complex molecules that play many critical roles in the body. They are made up of smaller units called amino acids, which are linked together in long chains. There are 20 different types of amino acids, and the specific sequence in which they are arranged determines the protein’s structure and function.

In 2003, David Baker, a professor at the University of Washington, succeeded in using these blocks to design a new protein that was unlike any other protein. Since then, his research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another. On a conference call following the announcement, he said "he is very excited and honoured," to receive the award.

In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper developed an AI model called AlphaFold2, as part of Google’s DeepMind project, that was able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.

While Demis Hassabis is CEO of Google DeepMind in London, John M. Jumper is a Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind.

The announcement was made in Stockholm as the much-awaited Nobel Week continues with recognition in six different fields. It is part of Alfred Nobel’s will, which specifically mentioned chemistry as one of the key categories.

Chemistry was not only the cornerstone of Nobel’s work but also the second-prize area he mentioned in his will. His inventions and industrial processes were deeply rooted in chemical knowledge, underscoring the importance he placed on this field of science.

Earlier, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, which went to AI pioneers J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.

The 2024 Nobel announcements kicked off with the Medicine Prize awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.