Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for work on proteins
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The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to three scientists for their breakthrough work predicting and even designing the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life.
The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to three scientists for their breakthrough work predicting and even designing the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life.
The prize was awarded to David Baker, who works at the University of Washington in Seattle, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who both work at Google DeepMind, a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory based in London.
Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said the award honored research that made connections between amino acid sequence and protein structure.
“That was actually called a grand challenge in chemistry, and in particular in biochemistry, for decades. So, it’s that breakthrough that gets awarded today,” he said.
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 pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors, the Nobel committee said.
“The number of designs that they have produced and published, and the variety, is absolutely mind blowing. It seems that you can almost construct any type of protein now with this technology,” said Professor Johan Åqvist of the Nobel committee.
Hassabis and Jumper created an artificial intelligence model that has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified, the committee added.
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