The world was astonished on Wednesday when half of the Nobel Prize in chemistry went to US scientist David Baker for “computational protein design” and the other half to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper in London for “protein structure prediction”.
What rallied global attention is the fact that both Hassabis and Jumper come from Google DeepMind, which specializes in artificial intelligence, and they created an AI model that fundamentally changes the way to study a protein’s structure. By understanding the three-dimensional structure of a protein, scientists can infer its role and how it interacts with other molecules, helping study diseases and develop new drugs.
