Yesterday we met the winners Nobel Prize in Physics. This came at the hands of the scientists who were involved in the birth of AI as we know it today. These were very popular names. On the other hand, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to David Baker “through computational protein design” and Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “To predict protein structure”.
As always happens with the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, it happened at just over 11:45 (Spanish Peninsula time) at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm and was announced by the institution’s Secretary General Hans Ellegren.
The winners will share a prize of 9 million Swedish kronor, equivalent to approximately 830,000 euros. Half will go to Baker of the University of Washington, and the other half will be split between Hassabis and Jumper of Google DeepMind.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein design and prediction.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics went to artificial intelligence, while the Prize in Chemistry went to a chemistry tool also based on machine learning. But everyone has achieved this in different areas.
Proteins are the chemical tools that keep us alive. Our genes are our instructions. It dictates everything necessary for our body to function properly, and also for us to be who we are: eye color, hair texture, the presence of certain diseases… Even our ability to roll our tongue.
For these instructions to be carried out, the information must be translated and converted into proteins. These are the tools that do it all.
Game with squirrel pieces
They are made up of 20 different types of blocks known as amino acids. Many different proteins are known. But could you take a few random amino acids and create a new protein, like Lego pieces?
This question was asked in 2003 by the first of the winners: David Baker. And he got it. It was originally just one, but his team has since made many other proteins that can perform a variety of functions. They can be used as drugs, vaccines, nanosensors, or even to develop new materials.
Creating non-existent proteins is useful. But the same can be said about predicting how they will turn out. And proteins are not a simple chain of amino acids. They fold to form bonds with each other, and it is this folding that gives them their specific function. A protein can be fully functional but become useless when it unfolds. Sometimes they can have different conformations with different functions. This is very difficult to predict. Scientists have been trying to do this since the 70s, but it took the advent of artificial intelligence.
In 2020 the company Deep MindGoogle developed a model called AlphaFold2, which was exactly the function that had given chemists so many headaches in recent decades. Demis Hassabis And John Jumper were the two main people responsible for this project, through which important processes such as bacterial resistance to antibiotics or how certain enzymes, which are also proteins, can degrade plastic can be much better understood. It is for this reason that both received the other half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Award Winning Women
Since it began in 1901, a total of 8 women have received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The first, Marie Curie, received the prize in 1911, eight years after receiving the prize in physics. It seemed like women would have a place in this award. However, in her case, although she well deserved it, she most likely would not have received it if not for the persistence of her husband, Pierre Curie. After her award, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was not awarded to any other scientist until her own daughter Irene Curie received it in 1935.
For this reason, today’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which is also in the hands of three people, shows us that we still have a long way to go. No women received the award this year, although there were good reasons for receiving the award.
Source: Hiper Textual
