Three computer scientists, including an artificial intelligence researcher at Google DeepMind, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for their work in protein science, including cracking the code for proteins¡¯ structures.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave half of the prize to David Baker, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, for computational protein design, and the other half to Demis Hassabis of University College London and John Jumper, CEO of London-based Google DeepMind, for work on predicting protein structure.
¡°One of the discoveries being recognized this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences. Both of these discoveries open up vast possibilities,¡± said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
Proteins drive all chemical reactions in the human body and function as hormones, signal substances, antibodies and building blocks of different tissues.
In 2003, Baker took 20 different amino acids, which make up proteins, and succeeded in designing a new protein that was unlike any other. His research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including those that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.
Hassabis and Jumper, meanwhile, have been involved in the prediction of protein structure, developing an AI model called AlphaFold2 in 2020. They have been able to predict the structure of virtually all of the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified, the Nobel committee said.
The 2023 prize was awarded to three U.S.-based scientists for the discovery and synthesis of ¡°quantum dots¡± ¡ª tiny clusters of atoms that are used to create color in a range of devices such as flat-screen TVs.
On Tuesday, a pair of AI researchers won the physics prize for their work enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks, while on Monday, two U.S. scientists won the medical Nobel for their discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.
Nobel announcements continue this week with the literature award on Thursday and the peace prize on Friday. The Nobel for economic sciences will be announced on Monday, closing out this year¡¯s awards.
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