David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper have been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their research on proteins, according to the announcement made by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on Wednesday.
The American David Baker will receive one half of the prize for computer protein design, and the other half will be shared by two scientists working in Great Britain, the British Demis Hassabis and the American John Jumper, for predicting protein structures. “David Baker has succeeded in the almost impossible feat of building a completely new type of protein. And Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an artificial intelligence model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting the complex structure of proteins,” – emphasizes the importance of the discoveries in the announcement of the Swedish Academy of Sciences .
Both discoveries awarded this year open up huge opportunities, emphasized Heiner Linke, the chairman of the Nobel committee in chemistry that awarded the prize. “Proteins are usually made up of 20 different amino acids, which can be called the building blocks of life. In 2003, David Baker managed to use these building blocks to design a new protein unlike any other protein. Since then, his research team has created one imagined protein structure after another, including as a drug , proteins that can be used as vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors,” the academy’s announcement highlighted.
The second discovery deals with the prediction of protein structures. “In proteins, the amino acids are arranged in long strands, which, when coiled up, form a three-dimensional structure that is crucial for the function of the protein,” they wrote, adding that researchers have been working since the 1970s to predict the structure of proteins from amino acid sequences, but only succeeded four years ago this is the breakthrough. In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented the AlphaFold2 artificial intelligence model, with the help of which they were able to predict the structure of almost all of the approximately 200 million proteins identified by researchers up to that point. The model has since been used by more than two million people from 190 countries.
In addition to many scientific applications, scientists can now better understand antibiotic resistance and get a picture of the enzymes that break down plastic. “Life could not exist without proteins. The fact that we can now predict the structure of proteins and design our own proteins is a huge advantage for humanity,” the academy underlined the significance of the two discoveries.
At today’s press conference announcing the awardees, David Baker also checked in by phone, calling the recognition a great honor. In response to a question, he said that although he had heard speculations about him as a contender, he was surprised by the award. He called the impact of the development of artificial intelligence on the future of science enormous. He said that the breakthrough of Demis Hassabis and John Jumper brought the possibilities of artificial intelligence to the forefront for them as well, and encouraged them to use artificial intelligence methods in protein design as well. “I’m very excited about how protein engineering is making the world a better place,” said the scientist.
David Baker was born in Seattle in 1962, received his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989, and is currently a professor at the University of Washington. Demis Hassabis was born in London in 1976, received his PhD in 2009 from University College London, and is currently the CEO of DeepMind, which he founded and which was acquired by Google in 2014. John M. Jumper was born in 1985 in Little Rock, USA, and received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2017. He is currently a senior research scientist at DeepMind in London.
Chemistry is traditionally the third in the line of announcements of a total of six Nobel Prizes. The literary prize is on Thursday, and the peace prize is on Friday. Nobel Week ends on Monday with the announcement of the winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. The awards will be presented on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, who founded the award, and this year 11 million Swedish kronor (388 million forints) will be distributed among the winners per category.
Source: sg.hu
