The 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to a trio of scientists who used artificial intelligence to “crack the code” of almost all known proteins, the “chemical tools of life,” reports the CNN.
Scientists David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the prestigious award for their work on the structure of proteins. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the same, adding that the awardees would take home a cash prize worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
“The potential of their discoveries is enormous,” the committee said, adding that the prize had two “halves.” The first went to Hassabis, a British computer scientist who co-founded the Google’s AI research laboratory DeepMind, and Jumper, an American researcher who also works at DeepMind. Hassabis and Jumper were lauded for using AI to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein from a sequence of amino acids, allowing them to predict the structure of almost all 200 million known proteins.
Their AI program – the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database – has been used by at least 2 million researchers around the world. It acts as a “Google search” for protein structures, providing instant access to predicted models of proteins, accelerating progress in fundamental biology and other related fields.
Proteins, a string of amino acid molecules, are the building blocks of life and form hair, skin and tissue cells. Research into this sphere is crucial as these proteins read, copy and repair DNA, and they help carry oxygen in the blood.
The second “half” of the prize went to Baker, an American biochemist and professor at the University of Washington, for using computerized methods to create proteins which did not previously exist.
