Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to scientists for work on proteins: NPR

Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind Technologies, speaks at a Google I/O event in Mountain View, Calif., on Tuesday, May 14, 2024.

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STOCKHOLM – The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded Wednesday to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their groundbreaking work predicting and designing the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life.

Heiner Linke, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said the prize recognized research that established connections between amino acid sequence and protein structure.

“This has been described as a major challenge in chemistry and particularly in biochemistry for decades. That is why it is this breakthrough that is being recognized today,” he said.

Baker works at the University of Washington in Seattle, while Hassabis and Jumper both work at Google Deepmind in London.

Baker designed a new protein in 2003, and his research group has since produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as drugs, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors, according to the Nobel Committee.

“The number of designs they have and have produced and released and… the variety is absolutely overwhelming. It seems that with this technology you can construct almost any type of protein,” said Professor Johan Åqvist from the Nobel Committee.

Hassabis and Jumper developed an artificial intelligence model that was able to predict the structure of virtually all of the 200 million proteins that researchers identified, the committee added.

Linke said scientists have long dreamed of predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins.

“Four years ago, in 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper managed to crack the code. “By cleverly using artificial intelligence, they made it possible to predict the complex structure of virtually every known protein in nature,” Linke said.

“Another dream of scientists was to build new proteins to learn how to use nature's multitool for our own purposes. This is the problem that David Baker solved,” he added. “He developed computational tools that now enable scientists to design spectacular new proteins with entirely novel shapes and functions, opening up endless possibilities for the greatest benefit of humanity.”

Last year, the chemistry prize went to three scientists for their work on quantum dots – tiny particles just a few nanometers in diameter that can emit very bright colored light and whose everyday applications include electronics and medical imaging.

Six days of Nobel Prize announcements began on Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning – John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton – won the physics prize.

The award ceremony for the literary prize continues on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the Economics Prize on October 14th.

The prize carries a cash prize of 11 million Swedish kroner (US$1 million) from an estate of the prize's creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death.