This morning, Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs Sir Demis Hassabis, and Google DeepMind Director Dr. John Jumper were co-awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work developing AlphaFold, a groundbreaking AI system that predicts the 3D structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences. David Baker was also co-awarded 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 making 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 among its recognitions are 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 Science Prize Award.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has long shown incredible potential for use in scientific research, and AlphaFold was proof-of-concept. As more scientists adopt AI for use in everything from building data, to simulating experiments, drug design, modelling complexity, discovering novel solutions for extant problems, and building upon existing knowledge, we will continue to see foundational scientific breakthroughs in the years ahead.
In a statement released after informed of the news, Demis Hassabis said:
“Receiving the Nobel Prize is the honour of a lifetime. Thank you to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, to John Jumper and the AlphaFold team, the wider DeepMind and Google teams, and to all my colleagues past and present that made this moment possible. I’ve dedicated my career to advancing AI because of its unparalleled potential to improve the lives of billions of people. AlphaFold has already been used by more than two million researchers to advance critical work, from enzyme design to drug discovery. I hope we’ll look back on AlphaFold as the first proof point of AI’s incredible potential to accelerate scientific discovery.”
After receiving the news that he won the Nobel Prize, John Jumper released the following statement:
“Thank you to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for this extraordinary honor. We are so honored to be recognized for delivering on the long promise of computational biology to help us understand the protein world and to inform the incredible work of experimental biologists. It is a key demonstration that AI will make science faster and ultimately help to understand disease 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 tremendous promise for creating practical insights that could be put to use in real-world experiments. AlphaFold delivered on this promise. Ahead of us are a universe of new insights and scientific discoveries made possible by the use of AI as a scientific tool. Thank you to my colleagues over the years, for making possible this moment of recognition, as well as the many moments of discovery that lie ahead.”
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