2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper. The prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 9 October 2024.

The citation

Half of the prize goes to David Baker "for computational protein design". Half of the prize goes jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper "for protein structure prediction".

The laureates

David Baker was born in 1962 in Seattle, the United States, and is affiliated with the University of Washington, Seattle and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Demis Hassabis was born in 1976 in London, United Kingdom, and is affiliated with Google DeepMind, London. John Jumper was born in 1985 in Little Rock, the United States, and is affiliated with Google DeepMind, London.

Why it matters

Baker designed entirely new proteins, while Hassabis and Jumper of Google DeepMind in London created AlphaFold, an AI model that predicts the shape of proteins. Hassabis was born in London.

The prize

The prize is worth 11 million Swedish kronor, divided between the laureates. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.