The 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to David Baker “for computational protein design” and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper “for protein structure prediction.”
Proteins are one of the foundational molecules of life. Baker, of the University of Washington in Seattle, “succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm said this morning in a press release. Hassabis and Jumper, both at Google DeepMind, “developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures.”
The trio will split the prize of 11 million Swedish kroner, or about $1 million.
This is a developing story that will be updated throughout the day.
