Trio of scientists win chemistry Nobel for work on the structure of proteins

Three computer scientists, including an artificial intelligence researcher at Google DeepMind, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for their work in protein science, including cracking the code for proteins’ structures.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave half of the prize to David Baker, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, for computational protein design, and the other half to Demis Hassabis of University College London and John Jumper, CEO of London-based Google DeepMind, for work on predicting protein structure.

“One of the discoveries being recognized this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences. Both of these discoveries open up vast possibilities,” said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.