Hassabis and Jumper share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for computational protein work, splitting it between David Baker, honoured separately for computational protein design, and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind, honoured jointly for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction. It was the second AI-linked Nobel announced that week, coming a day after Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield won the Physics prize for foundational neural-network research.

AlphaFold, first released in a form that matched experimental accuracy in 2020 and substantially extended in the AlphaFold 2 system, predicts a protein’s three-dimensional structure from its amino-acid sequence — a problem that had previously required years of laboratory work using techniques such as X-ray crystallography for a single structure. DeepMind said the freely accessible AlphaFold database had by the time of the award been used by more than two million researchers across some 190 countries, spanning work from enzyme design to drug discovery. Hassabis said AlphaFold had “already been used by more than two million researchers to advance critical work,” and Jumper said it showed AI would “make science faster and ultimately help to understand disease and develop therapeutics.”

The award followed earlier recognition of the same work, including the 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, and the underlying 2021 AlphaFold 2 paper had already become one of the most-cited scientific papers of any kind. Coming a day after the Physics prize, the pairing gave AI-adjacent research two of the three science Nobels in a single week — the clearest institutional signal yet that machine-learning methods had moved from a tool used alongside traditional science to work recognised as science in its own right, distinct from arguments then underway about AI’s more speculative or commercial applications.