Did Demis Hassabis Truly Deserve the Nobel Prize? [Video]

“Winning the Nobel Prize is the honour of a lifetime and the realisation of a lifelong dream – it still hasn’t really sunk in yet,” said the co-founder of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, who, along with his team, cracked the 50-year-old challenge of protein structure prediction with AlphaFold 2. 

“With AlphaFold 2 we cracked the grand challenge of protein structure prediction – predicting the 3D structure of a protein purely from its amino acid sequence,” said Hassabis. He added that the open-access database of over 200 million protein structures has empowered more than 2 million researchers, advancing critical work in enzyme design, disease understanding, and drug discovery. 

As AI continues to shape the future of therapies and scientific discovery, with teams like Isomorphic Labs driving AI-led innovations, the question arises—does AlphaFold’s monumental achievement justify its Nobel recognition, and does it set a precedent for AI-powered breakthroughs in global scientific accolades?

According to Heiner Linke, …