Nobel Prize Committee announces Chemistry Prize winners at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm
Jonathan Knackstrand/AFP via Getty Images
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their contributions to understanding the structure of proteins, which play an important role in all living things. Google DeepMind’s Hassabis and Jumper have developed artificial intelligence that predicts the structure of proteins. Baker, from the University of Washington in Seattle, is known for his work on designing new proteins.
Proteins are the molecules that create life. All the major mechanisms of life are made of proteins, from the muscles that move us to the molecules that read and copy our DNA to the antibodies that protect us from infections.
“To understand life, we first need to understand the shape of proteins,” Heiner Linke, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said at a press conference.
All proteins are made of chains of amino acids, of which there are about 20 different types. The shape of a protein is determined by its amino acid sequence, but the way the chains fold is so complex that it is very difficult to predict a protein’s structure from its sequence.
“For decades, this was thought to be impossible,” Linke says.
Several teams have developed various computational methods to predict protein structures, but their accuracy is low. Hassabis and Jumper then developed an AI called AlphaFold.
The first version of AlphaFold, released in 2018, was an improvement on other methods. The second, released in 2020, was a major breakthrough, predicting two-thirds of protein structures with more than 90% accuracy.
By 2022, AlphaFold was used to predict the structure of nearly every known protein, and the results were made freely available.
“This was a huge advance,” said Nobel Chemistry Committee member Johan Oqvist. “This is a great resource for chemistry and biology research.”
Baker has long worked on the opposite problem: designing proteins with desired structures. The possibilities here are endless. The new proteins could be used for almost anything, from treating diseases to creating complex nanomachines.
“David Baker has opened up a whole new world of proteins that we have never seen before,” Orkvist said. “That’s an amazing development.”
Baker created software called Rosetta to do this. This is also available for free. He and his team first designed Rosetta’s protein in 2003, creating it and using a technique called X-crystallography to show that it had the designed structure.
Although Oqvist described the 2003 study as a “major breakthrough,” the proteins created were small, simple, and did nothing.
Baker himself described the process as more gradual. “It’s really something that happened over the years,” he said. “Over the past 20 years, we have been able to design proteins with increasingly complex and powerful functions.”
“As our technology continues to improve, the range of applications becomes more and more exciting,” says Baker. “Proteins in nature have opened up a lot of possibilities because they do so many different things. They mediate every process in our bodies and in all living things.”
Mr. Baker also recognized the accomplishments of his colleagues. “I stood on the shoulders of giants. I’ve had some really great colleagues to work with throughout my career.”
Baker said the award came as a surprise despite speculation he might win. “It’s going to be a unique and special day.”
This is the third Nobel Prize in Chemistry so far this year. On October 8, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Jeffrey Hinton for their work on artificial neural networks. On October 7, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Victor Ambrose and Gary Lubukun for their discovery that small pieces of RNA called microRNAs play a critical role in gene regulation. It was done.
Last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three of the quantum dot developers. Quantum dots are extremely small particles whose electrical and optical properties are influenced by quantum physics.
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