NEW DELHI: The Nobel prize in Chemistry 2024 has been awarded to David Baker for “for computational protein design” with the other half jointly awarded to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction.”
The Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences made this announcement on Wednesday, a day after two pioneers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, won the physics award for artificial intelligence.
Last year, the chemistry prize was awarded to a trio of scientists for their research on quantum dots, which are minuscule particles measuring only a few nanometers in diameter.
Who are the laureates and what did they develop
David Baker: “Computational protein design”
Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry David Baker, aged 62 has “succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins,” the committee said in a statement.
His work has led to the creation of proteins that “can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors,” it added.
In recent years, his laboratory has produced a series of groundbreaking protein creations, including innovative nanomaterials in which up to 120 proteins spontaneously link together. These advancements have opened up exciting possibilities for new materials and applications in science.
Demis Hassabis & John M. Jumper: “Protein structure prediction”
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureates, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, have successfully harnessed artificial intelligence to predict the structure of almost all known proteins.
Demis and John, leaders at Google Deepmind, have developed a groundbreaking “AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures.”
Hassabis, 48, and Jumper, born in 1985, were widely speculated to be contenders for this year’s Nobel Prize for their work on the AI model AlphaFold.
In 2020, they introduced an AI model called AlphaFold2, which has since enabled the prediction of the structure of virtually all 200 million proteins identified by researchers. Since their groundbreaking achievement, AlphaFold2 has been used by over two million people across 190 countries. This innovation has a wide range of scientific applications, including advancing our understanding of antibiotic resistance and visualizing enzymes capable of breaking down plastic.
This tool predicts the three-dimensional structure of proteins based on their amino acid sequences.
The Nobel announcements, which span over six days, began on Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun being honored with the medicine prize.
The prize includes a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million), which originates from a bequest left by the award’s founder, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to accept their awards at ceremonies held on December 10, marking the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
The literature prize will be announced on Thursday, followed by the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.
While the economics award will be revealed on Oct. 14.