Chemistry Nobel Prize goes to AI pioneers

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three computer scientists for their work in determining the structure of proteins.

David Baker of the University of Washington and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google’s artificial intelligence lab, DeepMind, shared the award.

Proteins, the building blocks of life, are long chains of smaller molecules called amino acids, and their function is determined by their 3D shape.

DeepMind’s AI tool AlphaFold allowed near-instantaneous predictions of that shape from their 2D sequences, improving drug design and basic science, while Baker in 2003 was the first person to design a wholly new protein by chaining amino acids together using a computer program.