The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to scientists David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper for their work with proteins. Baker works at the University of Washington in Seattle, while Hassabis and Jumper both work at Google DeepMind in London, per the AP. Baker designed a new protein in 2003, and his research group has since produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials, and tiny sensors, the Nobel committee said. "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 professor Johan Åqvist of the Nobel committee.
Hassabis and Jumper, meanwhile, 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 committee added. "One of the discoveries being recognized this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins," says Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, per a release. "The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences. Both of these discoveries open up vast possibilities."
Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of artificial intelligence, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, won the physics prize on Tuesday. The awards continue with the literature prize on Thursday, while the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Monday. The prize carries a cash award of $1 million. (More Nobel Prize in chemistry stories.)
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