Demis Hassabis (left) and John Jumper (right) are seen here accepting a separate award at the 2024 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony in April. | Photo by Lester Cohen/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three scientists today — two of which 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…