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Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper of Google DeepMind predicted protein shapes with A.I. while David Baker designed “a new protein that was unlike any other,” the committee said.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to three scientists for discoveries that show the potential of advanced technology, including artificial intelligence, to predict the shape of proteins, life’s chemical tools, and to invent new ones.
The laureates are: Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind, who used A.I. to predict the structure of millions of proteins; and David Baker at the University of Washington, who used computer software to invent a new protein.
The impact of the work of this year’s laureates is “truly huge,” Johan Aqvist, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said on Wednesday. “In order to understand how proteins work, you need to know what they look like, and that’s what this year’s laureates have done.”
Wednesday’s prize was also the second this week to involve artificial intelligence, highlighting the technology’s growing significance in scientific research.
Dr. Hassabis and Dr. Jumper, the committee said, have used their artificial intelligence model, AlphaFold2, to calculate the structure of all human proteins. The researchers “also predicted the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have so far discovered when mapping Earth’s organisms,” the committee said.
Dr. Hassabis and Dr. Jumper were part of a team at Google DeepMind, the company’s central A.I. lab, that developed a technology called AlphaFold. This A.I. technology can rapidly and reliably predict the physical shape of proteins and enzymes — the microscopic mechanisms that drive the behavior of viruses, bacteria, the human body and all other living things.