Baker, Hassabis, and Jumper win 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

David Baker of the University of Washington, and Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper of Google DeepMind have won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Half of the prize is awarded to Baker for his research in computational protein design and the other half is shared by Hassabis and Jumper for protein structure prediction . The key to understanding protein function is discerning how these long polymers wrap themselves up in space. These wobbly 3D forms determine the arrangement of chemically active side chains and where another molecule might interact with the protein. The researchers awarded the prize have helped scientists predict those arrangements and design new proteins for specific functions. During the announcement, Johan Åqvist, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said the protein design problem began to be solved in 2003, when Baker’s Rosetta program designed a new protein fold from scratch . However, that was only