Blitz Bureau
STOCKHOLM: Two Google DeepMind scientists Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper, along with Washington University Professor David Baker, on October 9 won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
The scientists won the prestigious award for their research on protein design and structure.
“The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 Nobel Prize 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’,” the Academy said in a post on X.
Hassabis is the CEO of Google DeepMind in the UK, and Jumper is a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind.
While Baker from the US succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins, Hassabis and Jumper from the UK developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem of predicting proteins’ complex structures.
Baker, in 2003, succeeded in using 20 different amino acids to design a new protein. His research team has since then produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials, and tiny sensors.
