Stockholm, (APP – UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News – 9th Oct, 2024) Americans David Baker and John Jumper, together with Briton Demis Hassabis, shared the Nobel prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for work revealing proteins’ secrets through computing and artificial intelligence.
Biochemist Baker, 62, was given half the award “for computational protein design”, while Hassabis and Jumper shared the other half “for protein structure prediction,” the jury said.
“David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins,” the Nobel committee said in a statement.
It added that his work has led to the creation of proteins that “can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.
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Hassabis and Jumper have developed “an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures,” the jury said of the duo who head up Google Deepmind.
Hassabis, 48, and Jumper, who was born in 1985, were among those speculated on as contenders for this year’s Nobel for their work on the AI-model Alphafold.
The AI tool is used to predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins based on their amino acid sequence.
The jury noted that the discoveries of this year’s laureates “hold enormous potential.”
