The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to three scientists for their breakthrough work predicting and even designing the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life.
The prize was awarded to David Baker, who works at the University of Washington in Seattle, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who both work at Google DeepMind, a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory based in London.
Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said the award honored research that made connections between amino acid sequence and protein structure.
“That was actually called a grand challenge in chemistry, and in particular in biochemistry, for decades. So, it’s that breakthrough that gets awarded today,” he said.
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Baker designed a new protein in 2003 and his research group has since produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors, the Nobel committee said.
“The number of designs that they have produced and published, and the variety, is absolutely mind blowing. It seems that you can almost construct any type of protein now with this technology,” said Professor Johan Åqvist of the Nobel committee.
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Hassabis and Jumper created an artificial intelligence model that has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified, the committee added.
“Proteins are the molecules that enable life. Proteins are building blocks that form bones, skin, hair and tissue,” Linke said. “To understand how life works, we first need to understand the shape of proteins.”
Linke said scientists had therefore long dreamt of predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins.
“Four years ago, in 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper managed to crack the code. With skillful use of artificial intelligence, they made it possible to predict the complex structure of essentially any known protein in nature,” Linke said.
“Another dream of scientists has been to build new proteins, to learn how to use nature’s multi-tool for our own purposes. This is the problem that David Baker solved," he added. "He developed computational tools that now enable scientists to design spectacular new proteins with entirely novel shapes and functions, opening endless possibilities for the greatest benefit to humankind.”
Baker said Hassabis and John Jumper's artificial intelligence work gave his team a huge boost.
“The breakthroughs made by Demis and John on protein structure prediction really highlighted to us the power that AI could have. And that led us to apply these AI methods to protein design and that has greatly, increased the power and accuracy,” he said.
Baker told the Associated Press that the win was exciting. He found out during the early hours of the morning alongside his wife, who immediately started screaming.
“So it was a little deafening, too,” he said.
In an open call with the Nobel officials and journalists who attended the announcement in Stockholm, Baker was asked if he had a favorite protein.
He said he loves them all, adding: "So I don’t want to pick favorites, but I can tell you about one that we designed during the pandemic that protects against the coronavirus. And I’ve been very excited about the idea of a nasal spray, of little designed proteins, that would protect against all possible pandemic viruses.”
Hassabis is one of Britain’s leading tech figures, and was awarded a knighthood earlier this year for his services to artificial intelligence. He co-founded AI research lab DeepMind in 2010, which was later acquired by Google. DeepMind’s breakthroughs include developing an AI system that mastered the Chinese game of Go and was able to defeat the game’s human world champion much faster than expected.
Baker gets half of the prize money of 11 million Swedish Kronor ($1 million) while Hassabis and Jumper share the other half.
Last year, the chemistry award went to three scientists for their work on quantum dots — tiny particles just a few nanometers in diameter that can release very bright colored light and whose applications in everyday life include electronics and medical imaging.
Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the physics prize.
The awards continue with the literature prize on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.
The prize money comes from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
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Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands.
