Nobel Prize In Chemistry 2024: David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper win big for their work on proteins

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was granted to three scientists for their work with proteins on Wednesday. David Baker was awarded one half of the prize “for computational protein design” while the other half was given jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction”.

“This year’s Nobel Prize laureates in chemistry have revealed proteins’ secrets through computing and artificial intelligence. Chemists have long dreamed of fully understanding and mastering the chemical tools of life – proteins. This dream is now within reach. 2024 chemistry laureates Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper have successfully utilised artificial intelligence to predict the structure of almost all known proteins. This year’s chemistry laureate David Baker has learned how to master life’s building blocks and create entirely new proteins,” ,” read an official update shared on X.

The Nobel announcements began on Monday with two Americans — Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun — winning the medicine prize. John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton (considered to be founding fathers of machine learning) were awarded the physics prize on Tuesday.

The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.

Baker managed the “almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins”. Since then his research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another — including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.

Meanwhile Hassabis and Jumper — who work at Google Deepmind in London — have created an artificial intelligence model that has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified. AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries since their breakthrough in 2020. It has a variety of scientific applications and can even be used by researchers to better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.

(With inputs from agencies)