Americans David Baker and John Jumper, together with Briton Demis Hassabis, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for work revealing the secrets of proteins through computing and artificial intelligence.
The three were honoured for cracking the code of the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life, with the jury hailing their work as holding “enormous potential” in a range of fields.
Biochemist Baker, 62, was given half the award “for computational protein design”, while Hassabis and Jumper shared the other half “for protein structure prediction,” the Nobel committee said.
“David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins,” it said in a statement.
The committee added that his work has led to the creation of proteins that “can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.”
Hassabis and Jumper developed an AI model “to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting …