Nobel Prize in Chemistry Goes to 3 Scientists for Predicting and Creating Proteins
The New York Times
The Nobel, awarded to David Baker of the University of Washington and Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper of Google DeepMind, is the second this week to involve artificial intelligence.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to three scientists for discoveries that show the potential of advanced technology, including artificial intelligence, to predict the shape of proteins, life’s chemical tools, and to invent new ones.
The laureates are: Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind, who used A.I. to predict the structure of millions of proteins; and David Baker at the University of Washington, who used computer software to invent a new protein.
The impact of the work of this year’s laureates is “truly huge,” Johan Aqvist, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said on Wednesday, and has already been applied to the development of pharmaceuticals and other technologies. “In order to understand how proteins work, you need to know what they look like, and that’s what this year’s laureates have done.”
Wednesday’s prize was also the second this week to involve artificial intelligence, highlighting the technology’s growing significance in scientific research.
Proteins and enzymes are the microscopic mechanisms that drive the behavior of viruses, bacteria, the human body and all other living things. They begin as strings of chemical compounds, before twisting and folding into three-dimensional shapes that define what they can and cannot do. For many decades, scientists would spend months or even decades trying to pinpoint the precise shape of individual proteins.
Dr. Hassabis and Dr. Jumper were part of a team at Google DeepMind, the company’s central A.I. lab, and worked toward better understanding of protein structures. With their artificial intelligence mode, AlphaFold2, the Nobel committee said, they were eventually able to calculate the structure of all human proteins. The researchers “also predicted the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have so far discovered when mapping Earth’s organisms,” the committee said.
