At 5:45 p.m. Beijing time on October 9, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was announced, and the Royal Academy of Sciences of Sweden awarded this year's prize to David ·Baker· Demis Hassabis and John · · John Michael Jumper, three scientists won awards for their research on protein structure and design.
三位科学家将分享 1100 万瑞典克朗奖金。 奖金一半是授予大卫·贝克的，获奖理由是表彰他“对计算蛋白质设计的贡献”（for computational protein design），另一半则由德米斯·哈萨比斯和约翰· M·朱珀平分，他们的获奖理由是“对蛋白质结构预测的贡献”（for protein structure prediction）。
Among them, biochemist and computational biologist David · Baker, born in Seattle on October 6, 1962, received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989, and is currently a member of the National Academy of Sciences of United States and director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington.
David · Baker
Before the '90s, scientists could only give new functions to existing proteins by directional modifications (such as acting as catalysts in the chemical industry), David · Baker and his team chose to design proteins from scratch, the team drew entirely new structures, and then used Rosetta, a software they developed to predict protein structures, to calculate the required amino acid sequences, and they succeeded.
David · Baker's team designed the first protein Top7, which consists of 93 amino acids. It's completely different from existing proteins
This marks a major breakthrough in the field of protein engineering. Because of this, proteins can be directly designed through computer applications and algorithms, which gets rid of the limitations of existing proteins in nature, allowing scientists to directly "customize" proteins, so as to grasp the initiative in disease treatment, drug development, biology, new materials and other aspects.
David · Baker then open-sourced Rosetta, which further drove scientists around the world to continue to use and iterate on Rosetta, which also directly influenced Demis· Hassabis and John· M. · Juper's follow-up work.
Design proteins with Rosetta
Born in London on July 27, 1976, Demis· Hassabis received his Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from University College London, where he conducted research in neuroscience and artificial intelligence at MIT and Harvard. He founded DeepMind in 2010 with Shane ·Legg, Mustafa · Mustafa Suleyman, and he also came to Google in 2014 after its acquisition by Google, where he remains the CEO today.
Demis · Hassabis
John · M· Juper, who was born in 1985 in Little Rock, Arkansas, United States, received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2017 and is now a director and senior research scientist at DeepMind. And to win the Nobel Prize at the age of less than 40 is a very remarkable achievement.
John · M. · Zhuper