On Oct. 9, 2024, the Nobel Foundation awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry: one half to David Baker, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, Howard Hughes Medical Institute,“for computational protein design,” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper from Google DeepMind, London, UK “for protein structure prediction.”

Proteins generally consist of 20 different amino acids, which can be described as life’s building blocks. In 2003, David Baker succeeded in using these blocks to design a new protein that was unlike any other protein. In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified. Since their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries. 

Life could not exist without proteins. That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to humankind.