Google AI scientists win Nobel Prize in chemistry

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to three scientists today — two of whom are significant figures at Google DeepMind — for their work around proteins, which the Nobel Prize committee describes as the “chemical tools of life.” 

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and senior DeepMind research scientist John Jumper received the award for creating the open-source AlphaFold2 AI model to calculate the structure of human proteins. “With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified,” the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its announcement.

David Baker, who shares the prize with Hassabis and Jumper, was awarded for “computational protein design.” The Nobel committee noted that Baker had successfully designed a new protein in 2003 that was “unlike any other” and has since developed new proteins for pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials, and tiny sensors over the last two decades.

“One of the discoveries being recognised this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences,” said Nobel chemistry committee chair Heiner Linke. “Both of these discoveries open up vast possibilities.” 

The scientific applications for AlphaFold2 include helping researchers to understand antibiotic resistance and develop plastic degrading enzymes, according to the Nobel committee. “Work that once took years now takes just a few minutes thanks to this year’s chemistry laureates,” the Nobel committee said on X.

The development of artificial intelligence technology has played a notable role in this year’s lineup, with the Nobel Prize in physics being awarded yesterday to two scientists credited with building the “foundation” for AI. That announcement has already attracted criticism from some physicists who feel the award was miscategorized — a sentiment echoed by Geoffrey Hinton, one of the physics awardees who is known as a “godfather of AI.”

“If there was a Nobel Prize for computer science, our work would clearly be more appropriate for that,” Hinton said in a post-award interview with The New York Times. “But there isn’t one.” When commended for his comment by the Times, Hinton added that it was “also a hint.”