"DeepMind Researchers Awarded 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry"

A day after honoring former Google vice president Geoffrey Hinton for his contributions to physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to current Google employees. On Wednesday, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and senior research scientist John Jumper received half of the prize, while the other half was awarded to David Baker, a professor at the University of Washington.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry centers on proteins. All three winners—Baker, Hassabis, and Jumper—have significantly enhanced our understanding of these vital building blocks of life, which play crucial roles both within and outside the human body. The Nobel Committee specifically recognized Baker’s groundbreaking work in computational protein design. Since 2003, he and his team have been utilizing amino acids and computational methods to create entirely new proteins, which have subsequently contributed to the development of pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and nanomaterials.

BREAKING NEWS: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded 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."

Hassabis and Jumper’s contributions, alongside the DeepMind team’s work on AlphaFold 2, represent a major breakthrough. Since the 1970s, researchers have sought to predict a protein’s folded structure based solely on its amino acid sequence. With AlphaFold 2, DeepMind developed an AI algorithm capable of achieving this goal. Since its launch in 2020, the software has successfully predicted the structures of 200 million proteins, nearly all known to researchers.

"This year's discoveries highlight the construction of remarkable proteins and fulfill a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences," said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. "Both findings unlock vast new possibilities."

Overall, the 2024 Nobel Prizes underscore the increasing role of artificial intelligence in modern scientific advancements. Moving forward, advanced algorithms are poised to play a critical role in future breakthroughs.