Scientists David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the award-giving body said on Wednesday, for work on the structure of proteins.
The prize, widely regarded as among the most prestigious in the scientific world, was awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm and is worth the equivalent of $1.45 million Cdn, split among the award winners.
Half the prize was awarded to Baker “for computational protein design” while the other half was shared by Hassabis and Jumper “for protein structure prediction,” the academy said.
Baker works at the University of Washington in Seattle, while Hassabis and Jumper both work at Google Deepmind in London. Baker and Jumper are American, and Hassabis is British.
British Canadian scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as the godfather of AI, was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with American John Hopfield. The duo are being honoured for discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning within artificial neural networks.
The third award to be handed out every year, the chemistry prize follows those for medicine and physics announced earlier this week.
The Nobel prizes were established in the will of dynamite inventor and wealthy businessman Alfred Nobel and are awarded to “those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.”
The chemistry honours follow Nobel announcements so far this week in medicine and physics. The literature prize will be announced on Thursday, with the Nobel Peace Prize winner to be revealed on Friday.
The economics prize is announced on Oct. 14.
The Nobel prizes are presented to the laureates on Dec. 10.