On the 9th, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be awarded to David Baker for his contributions to computational protein design, while the other half will be jointly awarded to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper for their contributions to protein structure prediction.

The Nobel Prize website stated that this year's three Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry have deciphered the remarkable structures of proteins. The theme of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is proteins - the exquisite chemical tools of life. Baker, the chemistry prize winner, successfully completed an almost impossible task and constructed entirely new proteins.

The other two joint winners, Hassabis and Jumper, developed the AI model AlphaFold2 to solve a problem 50 years in the making: predicting the complex structures of proteins.

Hassabis and Jumper are employed at Google's DeepMind. Yesterday's Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the 'father of AI,' once again highlighting the Nobel Prize's favor towards artificial intelligence.

David Baker: Computational protein design, opening a new chapter for human health.

Baker was born in Seattle, obtained a Bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1984, and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. Currently, he serves as the Director of the Protein Design Institute at the University of Washington.

He won the 2020 Breakthrough Life Science Award for developing technology to design a new type of protein that has never appeared in nature, and for the first time used generative AI to design brand new antibodies from scratch, with the potential to enable AI to design proteins from scratch and enter the antibody drug market.

He is also known as a pioneering figure in the field of protein design, having proposed methods for predicting and designing the three-dimensional structure of proteins earlier than DeepMind, and even designed a protein structure design algorithm earlier than AlphaFold called RoseTTAFold.

His research team has created imaginative proteins one after another, including proteins that can be used as drugs, vaccines, nanomaterials, and microsensors.

Baker stated at the award-winning press conference: "Protein design can make the world a better place in health, medicine, and external technology fields, and I am very excited about it."

After the award ceremony, when a reporter asked him if he had a favorite protein, he replied, "I like all proteins, I don't want to pick a favorite."

"Proteins are the molecules that enable life to exist." Heiner Linke, Chairman of the Nobel Prize Committee for Chemistry, mentioned Baker's contributions and said:

"The computational tools he developed now enable scientists to design new proteins with entirely new shapes and functions, opening up endless possibilities for the greatest benefit of humanity."

AlphaFold2: Solving the Protein Folding Problem with AI

Hassabis was born in London in 1976 and graduated in computer science from the University of Cambridge. In 2010, Hassabis co-founded DeepMind with others, and four years later, Google acquired the company for 0.65 billion dollars.

DeepMind's goal is to create general artificial intelligence, an AI that can do anything the human brain can. The company is also exploring other technologies that can help achieve this goal, with one of them being AlphaFold.

Jumper was born in the USA. In 2017, he joined the laboratory as a researcher and collaborated with Hassabis and others on researching AlphaFold.

In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper proposed an AI model called AlphaFold2. With it, they can predict the structure of almost all 0.2 billion known proteins discovered by researchers.

The committee wrote in the award citation:

Since their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by over 2 million people from 190 countries. In various scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create enzymes that break down plastics.

AlphaFold2 can predict the 3D structure of a protein directly from its amino acid sequence with atomic-level accuracy. It is considered to have solved the 50-year-old protein folding challenge that has plagued humanity, rapidly advancing our understanding of fundamental biological processes and facilitating drug design.

Before this model emerged, scientists would take months or even decades to precisely determine the shape of a single protein, while AlphaFold2 can accomplish this task in a matter of hours or even minutes.

In May 2024, Jumper's team released AlphaFold3, which can predict not only proteins but also other molecules such as DNA and RNA. Unlike its predecessor, AlphaFold3 is not open source.

Last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus, and Aleksey Ekimov in recognition of their discovery of tiny particles called 'quantum dots'. Quantum dots are now widely used in tablet screens, light-emitting diodes (led) lights.