The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded Wednesday to David Becker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their remarkable research in predicting and designing the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life.
Heiner Linke, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said that the award honors research linking amino acid sequences to protein structure.
“This has actually been called a major challenge in chemistry, especially in biochemistry, for decades. So this breakthrough is what we got today,” he said.
Becker works at the University of Washington in Seattle, while Hassabis and Jumper both work at Google DeepMind in London.
Becker designed a new protein in 2003, and since then his research group has produced one novel protein after another, including proteins that could be used as drugs, vaccines, nanomaterials and small sensors, the Nobel committee said.
“The number of designs they have produced and published, and… the variety is absolutely astounding. It seems you can build almost any type of protein using this technology,” said Professor Johan Akvist of the Nobel Committee.
The committee added that Hassabis and Jumper created an artificial intelligence model that can predict the structure of all approximately 200 million proteins identified by the researchers.
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Link said scientists have long dreamed of predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins.
“Four years ago, in 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper cracked the code. “Through the skillful use of artificial intelligence, it has become possible to predict the complex structure of any protein known in nature,” Linke said.
“Another dream for scientists is to build new proteins to learn how to use nature’s many tools for our own purposes. This is the problem that David Becker solved,” he added. “He has developed computational tools that now enable scientists to design amazing new proteins with completely new shapes and functions, opening up possibilities for… “Infinite to achieve the greatest benefit to humanity.”
Last year, the Chemistry Prize was awarded to three scientists for their work on quantum dots – tiny particles just a few nanometers in diameter that can emit extremely bright colored light, and whose applications in everyday life include electronics and medical imaging.
Six days of Nobel Prize announcements opened on Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Rufkun winning the medicine prize. Two of the founding fathers of machine learning – John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton – have won the physics prize.
The awards continue with the Literature Prize on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize is scheduled to be announced on Friday and the Economics Prize on October 14.
The award carries a cash prize of 11 million Swedish krona ($1 million) from a will left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Winners are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies held on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands.
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