The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded on Wednesday October 9 to the American David Baker and a tandem formed by the British Demis Hassabis and the American John Jumper, for having unlocked the secrets of proteins, relying on intelligence artificial intelligence and computing. The jury praised these researchers who succeeded “in deciphering the code of astonishing protein structures” and whose discoveries “offer enormous potential”.
David Baker, a 62-year-old biochemist, was awarded “for computational protein design”, while Demis Hassabis and John Jumper were awarded for their work on “protein structure prediction” via artificial intelligence ( IA), according to the press release. “One of the discoveries awarded this year concerns the spectacular construction of proteins. The other consists of realizing a 50-year-old dream: predicting the structure of proteins from amino acid sequences. These two discoveries open up vast perspectives “, summarized Heiner Linke, president of the Nobel committee.
David Baker “achieved the almost impossible feat of constructing entirely new proteins”, explains the jury. Proteins are generally made up of 20 different amino acids. In 2003, he succeeded, “from these constituent elements of life” in forming a new protein different from all existing ones. Questioned by the Nobel jury, David Baker said he was “very enthusiastic and very honored”. “I was sleeping when the phone rang, I picked it up and heard the announcement, then my wife started screaming.”
For their part, Demis Hassabis, aged 48, and John Jumper, born in 1985, run Google DeepMind and in 2020 developed an AI model called AlphaFold2 to determine the structure of proteins. “Since the 1970s, researchers have tried to predict the structures of proteins from their amino acids, but this task was notoriously difficult,” underlines the jury. “With the help of this AI, they managed to predict the structure of almost all of the 200 million proteins identified by the researchers,” he adds.
Computational biology
The two men, cited among the favorites, had already received the prestigious Lasker Prize in 2023. “I was stunned and I was blank for a few minutes,” Demis Hassabis told the TT agency. Of their work with John Jumper, he said that “it has been a real challenge for computational biology”. “We used every modern machine learning technique and known structure discovered over the past 50 years, and we managed to build a system capable of folding and finding the structure of virtually every protein known to science” , he added.
Last year, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to a trio for their research on nanoparticles called quantum dots: Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov, born respectively in France, the United States and the USSR. These very small components of nanotechnology now diffuse light from TVs and LEDs and can also guide surgeons when removing tumor tissue.