dpa
Stockholm
A trio of protein researchers, including two leaders of Google’s artificial intelligence subsidiary DeepMind, have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, from the United Kingdom, and US scientist John Jumper were recognized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for their work on protein structure, along with US chemist David Baker for his research on computational protein design.
Proteins, composed of amino acids, are the building blocks of life.
The trio’s achievements have "revealed proteins’ secrets through computing and artificial intelligence,” the awards committee said on the social media platform X.
"To understand how life works, we first need to understand the shape of proteins,” said Professor Heiner Linke - a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry - at the announcement in Stockholm.
"It has long been a dream to learn to predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins. [...] For several decades, this was considered impossible,” Linke added, but DeepMind’s work "made it possible to predict the complex structure of essentially any known protein in nature.” In 2020, Hassabis and Jumper jointly created AlphaFold, an AI programme that predicted the structure of almost all known proteins.
The 48-year-old Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010. After its acquisition by Google, the company later became known for its AlphaGo programme, which defeated the world’s top players of the board game Go.
Jumper, born in 1985, is one of the youngest recipients of the Nobel Prize and was recently included in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in AI.