On October 9, 2024, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on proteins. According to the academy’s press release, one half went to David Baker “for computational protein design,” and the other half was shared by Demis Hassabis and John Jumper “for protein structure prediction.”
Baker, at the University of Washington, was recognized for building entirely new proteins that do not exist in nature, with uses ranging from pharmaceuticals and vaccines to nanomaterials and sensors. Hassabis and Jumper, at Google DeepMind, were honored for AlphaFold2, an AI model that solved a roughly 50-year-old grand challenge by predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino-acid sequences. The press release notes that AlphaFold has been used to predict the structure of virtually all 200 million proteins researchers have identified and has been adopted by more than two million researchers worldwide.
This was the second Nobel of 2024 tied to artificial intelligence; the Physics prize that year went to Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield for foundational neural network work. The Chemistry award marked a striking moment in which a machine learning system was credited with a fundamental scientific breakthrough.