Nobel chemistry award goes to trio of scientists researching protein structure

Scientists David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the award-giving body said on Wednesday, for work on the structure of proteins.

The prize, widely regarded as among the most prestigious in the scientific world, was awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm and is worth the equivalent of $1.45 million Cdn, split among the award winners.

Half the prize was awarded to Baker "for computational protein design" while the other half was shared by Hassabis and Jumper "for protein structure prediction," the academy said.

Baker works at the University of Washington in Seattle, while Hassabis and Jumper both work at Google Deepmind in London. Baker and Jumper are American, and Hassabis is British.

'Mind-blowing' advancement: committee member

Hassabis and Jumper utilized artificial intelligence to predict the structure of almost all known proteins, while Baker learned how to master life's building blocks and create entirely new proteins, the award-giving body said.

"One of the discoveries being recognized this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins," the academy said in a statement. "The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences."

In 2003, Baker was able to use amino acids, often described as life's building blocks, to design a new protein that was unlike any existing one, the academy said.

"I'm really excited about all the ways in which protein design makes the world a better place in health, medicine and really, outside technology," Baker said by phone to the press conference announcing the prize.

Baker's research opened the door to the rapid creation of different proteins for uses in areas such as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and even tiny sensors.

"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 with this technology," said Johan Åqvist, from the Nobel committee.

Literature prize next to be awarded

In 2020, Hassabis and Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified, the academy said.

"It's totally surreal to be honest, quite overwhelming," Deepmind CEO Hassabis told Reuters, thanking his company as well as his colleague Jumper, who is the U.S. director for Deepmind.

"David Baker, we've got to know in the last few years, and he's done some absolutely seminal work in protein design," he said. "So it's really, really exciting to receive the prize with both of them."

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The award is the second this week given for work involving artificial intelligence, following the physics prize on Tuesday, which was awarded to the University of Toronto's Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield from Princeton University. The prizes underscore the growing importance of machine learning and large language models for science.

"That's always been my passion, but ... it's like any powerful general-purpose technology, it can be used for harm, as well, if put in the wrong hands and used for the wrong ends," Hassabis said.

The third award to be handed out every year, the chemistry prize follows those for medicine and physics announced earlier this week.

The Nobel prizes were established in the will of dynamite inventor and wealthy businessman Alfred Nobel and are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind."

The chemistry honours follow Nobel announcements so far this week in medicine and physics. The literature prize will be announced on Thursday, with the Nobel Peace Prize winner to be revealed on Friday.

The economics prize is announced on Oct. 14.

The Nobel prizes are presented to the laureates on Dec. 10.