London: The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be awarded to three scientists, with one half going to David Baker, and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M Jumper, for their groundbreaking work on protein science.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday that Baker of the University of Washington, Seattle was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “computational protein design,” while Hassabis and Jumper of Google DeepMind, London, UK, were honoured for “protein structure prediction.”
“One of the discoveries being recognised 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 of these discoveries open up vast possibilities,” said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
In an extraordinary feat, Baker designed entirely new proteins.
Hassabis and Jumper developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model to solve a 50-year-old challenge — predicting the complex three-dimensional structures of proteins.