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Demis Hassabis and John Jumper share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded half the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures from amino-acid sequences. The other half went to David Baker for designing new proteins. AlphaFold has been used to predict almost all 200 million known proteins.
- Hassabis and Jumper (Google DeepMind): half the prize for AlphaFold protein structure prediction
- David Baker (University of Washington): half the prize for designing new proteins
- AlphaFold solved 50-year problem; predicted nearly all 200M known proteins
- Practical impact: enables pharmaceutical design and protein engineering across health and medicine