Nobel Prize for Chemistry: Predicting and producing proteins

Will Tingle is back with more Nobel Prizes. Three of them have scooped the next award. Although, as we'll find out, it’s not been shared equally…

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been won by two researchers from the AI company Deepmind, its co-founder, Sir Demis Hassabis, and research scientist John Jumper. They share the award with the University of Washington’s David Baker.

All three have worked in one way or another on the structures of proteins, the three dimensional molecules that make life possible. Baker won for his work on creating entirely new synthetic kinds of proteins not found in nature but which can operate as drugs, vaccines and sensor molecules.

Meanwhile, the Deepmind duo are recognised for their pioneering work cracking the “hard problem” in biochemistry: predicting the structures of proteins from the sequence of the gene that encodes them, or the amino acids that compose them.

It’s a key nut to crack because knowing the shape of a protein molecule is critical to understanding its behaviour and contribution to life processes, role in health and disease, and potential as a drug or therapeutic target.

Hassabis and Jumper achieved their breakthrough by harnessing the artificial intelligence muscle they’d developed at Deepmind. Their tool, called AlphaFold2, achieved what scientists had tried and failed to do for decades.

According to the Nobel Prize Committee, the work has revolutionised chemistry, and led to the mapping of the structures of around 200 million important protein structures globally.

Interestingly enough, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry hasn’t been split evenly. Hassabis and Jumper will share half of it, and the other half goes to Baker. I’m not sure they’ll mind though. Hassabis has come a long way since his days of writing computer games: before joining Queens’ College, Cambridge as a student he took a gap year and wrote the blockbuster “Theme Park” simulation game. This is what he told Chris Smith on this very programme in 2009:

Demis: Although I had been in the games industry for a long while, underlying all the games I'd been involved with designing and programming actually composed a lot of AI in those games. Most of the games were big strategy.

Chris: Artificial Intelligence for the non-initiated like me.
Demis: That's right. All the games I wrote like Theme Park and Republic and Evil Genius. They all involved simulations. Most of them involved hundreds of little computer people coming in and getting involved with the game environment. Most of the games, like Theme Park, involved you manipulating that environment and seeing how these autonomous agents reacted to what you were doing. Those were the kinds of games I found fun to play and they were the kinds of games I found fun to create. But so underlying all of this was my passion. My main passion is actually in artificial intelligence and related to that (as soon as you start thinking about what artificial intelligence is) then you start thinking about - how is it the mind achieves these end-goals?
He wasn’t wrong was he? It goes to show that you can indulge your interests and have a successful career. It might even help you win a Nobel Prize, or at least a share of it.