Demis Hassabis and John Jumper receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

This morning Sir Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, and Dr. John Jumper, director of Google DeepMind, shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work developing AlphaFold, a groundbreaking AI system that predicts the 3D structure of proteins based on their amino acid sequences. David Baker also received the award for his work on computational protein design.

Before AlphaFold, predicting the structure of a protein was a complex and time-consuming process.

AlphaFold's predictions, made freely available through the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, have given more than 2 million scientists and researchers from 190 countries a powerful tool for new discoveries. The AlphaFold 2 paper, published in 2021, remains one of the most cited publications of all time.

AlphaFold's contributions to science have been widely praised, and his recognitions include the 2023 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the 2023 Canada Gairdner International Award, the 2024 Clarivate Citation Laureate Award, and the 2024 Keio Medical Awarded the Science Prize.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has long shown incredible potential for use in scientific research, and AlphaFold was the proof-of-concept. As more and more scientists adopt AI for use in everything from data creation to simulating experiments, drug design, modeling complexity, discovering novel solutions to existing problems and building on existing knowledge, we will be in the coming years continue to experience fundamental scientific breakthroughs.

In a statement released after the news was announced, Demis Hassabis said:

“Receiving the Nobel Prize is the honor of my life. Thank you to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, to John Jumper and the AlphaFold team, the broader DeepMind and Google teams, and to all my colleagues, past and present, who made this moment possible.” I have made my career the Dedicated to advancing AI, as AlphaFold has hopefully already been used by more than two million researchers to advance important work 'll We look back on AlphaFold as the first evidence of AI's incredible potential to accelerate scientific discovery.”

After receiving the news that he had won the Nobel Prize, John Jumper released the following statement:

“Many thanks to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for this extraordinary honor. We are deeply honored to be recognized for fulfilling the long promise of computational biology to help us understand the protein world and support the incredible work of experimental biologists. This is it,” important evidence that AI will make science faster and ultimately help understand diseases and develop therapeutics. This is the work of an exceptional team at Google DeepMind and this award recognizes their amazing work.

Computational biology has long held great promise for generating practical insights that could be used in real-world experiments. AlphaFold has kept this promise. Before us lies a universe of new knowledge and scientific discoveries made possible by the use of AI as a scientific tool. Thank you to my colleagues over the years for making this moment of recognition possible, as well as the many moments of discovery that lie ahead.”

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