Nobel Prize in Chemistry announced! David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper received the award

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024: The Nobel Prize winners in the field of Chemistry for 2024 have been announced. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday (October 09) that the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper. These people have been honored with this award for their unprecedented contribution to protein science.

David Baker of the University of Washington, Seattle, US, was awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for computational protein design”, while Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper of Google DeepMind, London, UK, received the prize “for protein structure prediction”. given.

What did the Chairman of the Nobel Committee say?

“One of the discoveries recognized this year pertains to the creation of brilliant proteins,” Heiner Linke, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a Hindustan Times report. The other discovery is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream. “These two discoveries open up enormous possibilities for predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences.”

David Baker prepared protein in 2003

David Baker has achieved the extraordinary feat of designing entirely new proteins, while Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model to solve a 50-year-old challenge of how to understand the complex tri-fold structure of proteins. Predicts dimensional structures.

In 2003, Baker successfully prepared a new protein. Since then, his research group has created many innovative proteins that can be used in pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and sensors.

Meanwhile, Hassabis and Jumper’s AI-based breakthrough came in 2020 with the introduction of AlphaFold2. Their model could predict the structure of nearly all 200 million proteins the researchers identified. This was an achievement which was earlier considered impossible.

“Life is not possible without proteins. We can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins, which is the greatest benefit to mankind,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

Also read: Nobel Prize 2024: American scientists Victor Ambrose and Gary Ruvkun receive Nobel Prize in Medicine, honored for discovery of microRNA