BREAKING NEWS
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2024
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 #NobelPrize in Chemistry with one half to David Baker “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction.” pic.twitter.com/gYrdFFcD4T
David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper have won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work on proteins.
Demis Hassabis co-founded the artificial intelligence research company that became Google DeepMind.
Proteins are the building blocks of life and are found in every cell in the human body.
A better understanding of proteins has driven huge breakthroughs in medicine.
Professor David Baker, based in the US, used amino acids to design a new protein, opening the door to the creation of new proteins used in pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and other tools.
Prof Baker told the committee shortly after the announcement that he was "very excited and very honored".
"I stood on the shoulders of giants," he said when asked how he had cracked the code of creating proteins.
UK-based Demis Hassabis and John Jumper used artificial intelligence to predict the structures of almost all known proteins and created a tool called AlphaFold2.
The committee called it a "complete revolution" in chemistry, used by 200 million people worldwide.
The announcement was made by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at a press conference in Stockholm, Sweden.
The winners share a prize fund worth 11m Swedish kronor .
This year’s #NobelPrize laureates in chemistry have revealed proteins’ secrets through computing and artificial intelligence.
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2024
Chemists have long dreamed of fully understanding and mastering the chemical tools of life – proteins. This dream is now within reach. 2024 chemistry… pic.twitter.com/4MKdvKb39o
This year’s chemistry laureates Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model, AlphaFold2, to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures.
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2024
Check out two examples of protein structures determined using AlphaFold2. First up, a bacterial enzyme… pic.twitter.com/ckIiIAGGMX
Let’s take a closer look at this protein structure determined using AlphaFold2. This protein structure is part of a huge molecular structure in the human body. More than a thousand proteins form a pore through the membrane surrounding the cell nucleus.
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2024
Animation: ©Terezia… pic.twitter.com/840RqbJrJD