The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry shared between David Baker, for achieving the nearly impossible feat of constructing completely new types of proteins, and Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper, who developed an artificial intelligence model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting the complex structures of proteins.
“One of the discoveries awarded this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins,” said Heiner Linke, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. “The other refers to the realization of a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences. “Both discoveries open up enormous possibilities.”
Proteins are made up of 20 different amino acids, which can be described as the building blocks of life. In 2003, David Baker managed to use these components to design a new protein that was unlike any other. Since then, his research group has produced one protein after another, including proteins that can be used as drugs, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.
The second discovery concerns the prediction of protein structure. In proteins, amino acids are linked together in long chains that fold into a three-dimensional structure, determining how the protein functions. Since the 1970s, researchers had been trying to predict the structure of proteins from amino acid sequences, but this was notoriously difficult. However, four years ago, a surprising breakthrough occurred.
In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an artificial intelligence model called AlphaFold2. With their help, they were able to predict the structure of virtually all of the 200 million proteins identified by the researchers. Since its breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people in 190 countries. Among a host of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and visualize the enzymes capable of breaking down plastic.
This prize has a very direct link with the Nobel Prize in Physics announced this Tuesday, in which the work of the inventors of machine learning with artificial neural networks, essential for predicting the structure of proteins, was recognized.
With this announcement, and in the midst of controversy over its stubborn machismo, the Nobel committee adds seven scientific prizes for men and none for women, perpetuating a prejudice that it does not seem to have any intention of correcting.
