- Two of the scientists used artificial intelligence to calculate the structure of all human proteins | Photo: EFE
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the American David Baker for the computational design of proteins and to Demis Hassabis (the United Kingdom) and John M. Jumper (the United States) for the prediction of their structure, reported on Wednesday the 9th. of October the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
The work of the three scientists has in common that they have contributed to deciphering the code of the “incredible structures” of proteins, made up of amino acid molecules.
In 2003, Baker, at the University of Washington in Seattle, managed to design a protein unlike any that existed and then created many “spectacular” proteins in his laboratory using his Rosetta software program.
Baker’s team has produced proteins that can be used as pharmaceutical vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.
On the other hand, Hassabis and Jumper, both researchers at Google DeepMind, in London (England), have used an artificial intelligence (AI) model to calculate the structure of all human proteins.
This has also allowed them to predict the structure of practically the 200 million types of proteins that have been discovered in Earth’s organisms.
According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the work of the three laureates has made it possible for a task that previously took years to be carried out in just minutes.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is the third in the round of these prestigious awards, after the award was announced on October 8. Nobel Prize in Physics, which went to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton and waiting for the winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature to be announced on October 10, the Nobel Peace Prize on October 11 and finally on October 14 in Economics.
The other recognitions
On October 8, scientists John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for their fundamental discoveries and inventions enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences indicated that Hopfield, of Princeton University, in the United States, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns contained in data.
While Hinton, from the University of Toronto (Canada), invented a method that can independently discover properties in data and that has become important for large artificial neural networks in use today.
On October 7, American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were recognized with the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology 2024 for the discovery of micro-RNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.
Ambros and Ruvkun became interested in how different cell types develop and discovered micro-RNAs, a new class of tiny RNA molecules that play “a crucial role” in gene regulation.
The Nobel Prizes of 2023
In 2023, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to scientists Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov “for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots”, particles that have unique properties and now diffuse their light from LED screens and lamps. In addition, it has applications in fields such as biochemistry and medicine.
“Quantum dots are an important part of the nanotechnology toolbox. All the 2023 Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry have been pioneers in the exploration of the nanoworld,” the academy highlighted at the time, explaining the reasons for granting the award.
As for the Nobel Prize in Physics 2023was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier for their experimental methods to generate light pulses of attosecond duration for the study of the dynamics of electrons in matter, reported the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
The academy highlighted that the potential applications of these methods investigated by the winners are in the fields of electronics and medicine.
While the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their research related to messenger RNA vaccines against covid-19. Discoveries that were fundamental during the pandemic that began at the beginning of 2020.
These were the other winners of a Nobel Prize in 2023:
-Nobel Prize for Literature for the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse
-Nobel Peace Prize for Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi
-Nobel Prize in Economics for the American Claudia Goldin
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