STOCKHOLM, Sweden –
The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to three scientists for their breakthrough work predicting and even designing the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life.
The prize was awarded to David Baker, who works at the University of Washington in Seattle, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who both work at Google DeepMind, a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory based in London.
Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said the award honored research that made connections between amino acid sequence and protein structure.
“That was actually called a grand challenge in chemistry, and in particular in biochemistry, for decades. So, it’s that breakthrough that gets awarded today,” he said.
Baker designed a new protein in 2003 and his research group has since produced one imaginative protein creation …