Work on proteins: Nobel chemistry prize goes to trio

US Scientists David Baker and John Jumper and Briton Demis Hassabis won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry yesterday for work on decoding the structure of proteins and creating new ones, yielding advances in areas such as drug development.
Half the prize was awarded to Baker “for computational protein design” while the other half was shared by Hassabis and Jumper “for protein structure prediction”, said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which makes the award.
Baker, 62, is a professor at the University of Washington, in Seattle, while Hassabis, 48, is CEO of Google DeepMind, the AI research subsidiary of Google, where Jumper, 39, also works as senior research scientist. Hassabis and Jumper utilised artificial intelligence to predict the structure of almost all known proteins, while Baker learned how to master life’s building blocks and create entirely new proteins, the award-giving body said.
“This is a monumental achievement for AI, for computational biology, and science itself,” Google DeepMind said on X.
The award is the second this week given for work involving artificial intelligence, underscoring the growing importance of machine learning and large language models for science.
“One of the discoveries being recognised this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins,” the academy said in a statement. “The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences.”
The prize, widely regarded as among the most prestigious in the scientific world, is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).