David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have been awarded the 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry for research on predicting protein structures and designing new proteins
By Michael Le Page
9 October 2024
The Nobel prize committee announce the chemistry prize winners at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm
JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP via Getty Images
The 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry has been awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their work on understanding the structure of proteins, which play vital roles in all living organisms. Hassabis and Jumper, of Google DeepMind, developed an artificial intelligence that predicts the structure of proteins. Baker, at the University of Washington in Seattle, has been recognised for his work on designing new proteins.
Proteins are the molecules that make life happen. All of the key machinery of life is made of proteins, from the muscles that power us and the molecules that read and copy DNA to the antibodies that protect us from infections.
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“To understand life, you first need to understand the shape of proteins,” said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel committee for chemistry, at a press conference.
All proteins are made of chains of amino acids, and there are around 20 different kinds of these compounds. The shape of proteins is determined by the sequence of amino acids, but the way in which the chains fold up is so complex that predicting a protein’s structure from its sequence is extremely challenging.
“For several decades, this was considered impossible,” said Linke.