STOCKHOLM — The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their work with proteins, the building blocks of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Baker works at the University of Washington in Seattle, while Hassabis and Jumper both work at Google Deepmind in London.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Baker designed a new protein in 2003 and his research group has since produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors, the Nobel committee said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hassabis and Jumper created an artificial intelligence model that has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified, the committee added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said scientists had long dreamt of predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFour years ago in 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper managed to crack the code with skillful use of artificial intelligence. They made it possible to predict the complex structure of essentially any known protein in nature,\u201d Linke said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAnother dream of scientists has been to build new proteins to learn how to use nature\u2019s multi-tool for our own purposes. This is the problem that David Baker solved,” he added. “He developed computational tools that now enable scientists to design spectacular new proteins with entirely novel shapes and functions, opening endless possibilities for the greatest benefit to humankind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last year<\/a>, the chemistry award went to three scientists for their work on quantum dots \u2014 tiny particles just a few nanometers in diameter that can release very bright colored light and whose applications in everyday life include electronics and medical imaging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning \u2014 John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton \u2014 won the physics prize<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The awards continue with the literature prize on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.<\/p>\n\n\n\n