The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 was awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their contribution to the discovery of all protein structures that exist in the world. The prize is split in two with half going to David Baker for contributions to computational protein design. The other half of the prize goes to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for contributions to protein structure prediction.
Hassabis and Jumper developed the artificial intelligence (AI) AlphaFold at Google DeepMind two years ago with it discovering more than 200 million protein structures that exist in the world to advance medical science. So far AlphaFord's findings have been used to develop better antibiotics as well as solutions to the problem of plastic pollution.
AlphaFord would not have been able to make this discovery without the research done by David Baker from the University of Washington in 2003 when his team discovered the new structure of proteins by rearranging amino acid blocks.
This is the second Nobel Prize this year involving AI technology. Yesterday the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton who developed the machine learning technology that forms the basis of AI technology. Geoffrey Hinton is the Father of AI because of his research on building neural networks similar to the human brain using computers.
Half of the prize of 11 million Swedish Kronor (~RM 4.6 million) will be received by Baker while Hassabis and Jumper share the remaining half of the prize.