Stockholm: The Nobel Prize 2024 in Chemistry was awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John M Jumper for the use of artificial intelligence to predict the structure of proteins, the Nobel Committee announced on Wednesday. The prize, widely regarded as among the most prestigious in the scientific world, is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
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. "One of the discoveries being recognised this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences," it said.
Baker works at the University of Washington in Seattle, while Hassabis and Jumper both work at Google Deepmind in London. Hans Ellegren, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences that decides on the winner, announced the prize.
In 2003, Baker designed a new protein and since then, his research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors, the Nobel committee said. 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 third award to be handed out every year, the chemistry prize follows those for medicine and physics announced earlier this week. Last year, the chemistry award went to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Aleksey Ekimov for their work on quantum dots — tiny particles just a few nanometres in diameter that can release very bright coloured light and whose applications in everyday life include electronics and medical imaging.
The announcements for Nobel Prize 2024 opened on Monday with Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the physics prize. The awards continue with the literature prize on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on October 14.
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". First handed out in 1901, 15 years after Nobel's death, it is awarded for achievements in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace.
(with inputs from agencies)
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