This year, half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to David Baker (USA) and the other half to the British Demis Hassabis and the American-born John Jumper. This was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Baker, who works at the University of Washington in his native Seattle, receives the prize for computational protein design. Hassabis and Jumper have developed an AI at Google Deep Mind that can predict the complex structures of proteins.
According to the academy, Baker achieved the almost impossible: Using computers, he was able to not only calculate the building instructions for proteins, but also develop new, never-before-seen proteins. Hassabis and Jumper, on the other hand, have solved a decades-old problem with their AI: They can predict the structures of highly complex biomolecules. “One of the discoveries being recognized 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. Both discoveries open up enormous possibilities,” said Heiner Linke, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
Similar to the 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine, this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry delves deeply into life. “We have a great price today,” Linke said. “Proteins are the molecules that make life possible.” They are small machines in the body that implement processes, they are pumps that enable the work of nerve cells in the brain, they are hormones or antibodies with their infinitely important functions in defense of diseases, and much more.
The most important discoveries only occurred a few years ago
As tiny as proteins appear to humans, not only is their importance for the organism huge, but also their size – at least in comparison to other molecules. They sometimes consist of 100,000 atoms. Thousands of amino acids are strung together to form a protein. As random and tangled as the result may seem, the shape of a protein is determined by the sequence of its amino acids. That’s why protein structures can be predicted with the help of computers, as Hassabis and Jumper did, and why new proteins can be designed on computers, as Baker did. However, it took a lot of computing power and a lot of brain power to understand and simulate the system behind it.
All three prize winners have only made their important discoveries in recent years. This is almost unusual for recent Nobel Prizes. This means that the laureates are a whole generation younger than the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physics. At 62, Baker is the oldest of them, Hassabis, who works as CEO of Google Deep Mind and founded the predecessor company Deep Mind in 2010, which was then bought by Google in 2014 for a spectacular $400 million, is 48 years old and Jumper was only Born in 1985 in Little Rock, Arkansas.
This time, the Royal Swedish Academy was able to prevent a breakdown like last year. Back then, the names of the chemistry prize winners were leaked hours before the press conference. Apparently someone from the press office accidentally sent the otherwise carefully guarded message to the Swedish media in the early hours of the morning. The Academy had always acted as if the decision had only been made shortly before the announcement, which was doubtful in any case given the meticulously prepared press documents. But to this day, the selection of the winners is a top secret process. Not even the names of the nominees will be published until 50 years have passed, according to the Nobel Foundation’s statutes.
After medicine and physics, chemistry is traditionally the third of a total of six prize categories in which various institutions in Stockholm and Oslo award the Nobel Prizes. The Nobel Prize for Literature follows on Thursday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. Finally, the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences will be awarded on Monday, which is the only one of the awards that does not go back to the will of the prize founder and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896).
This year, the Nobel Prizes are once again endowed with eleven million Swedish crowns (almost 970,000 euros) per prize category. If the award in a category goes to two or three winners at the same time, they share this sum. The medals will be ceremoniously presented on the anniversary of Nobel’s death, December 10th.