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The science Nobel Prize announcements for 2024 drew to a close on Wednesday evening, adding seven new laureates to the roster as well as showcasing a preference for AI-related work.
The last of the science Nobel Prizes 2024 were announced today, for chemistry, with David Baker winning for “for computational protein design” along with Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper being jointly awarded “for protein structure prediction”.
The Nobel Committee noted that David Baker’s “almost impossible” achievement of building entirely new types of protein and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper’s feat of developing an AI model to predict the complex structures of proteins “hold enormous potential”.
There are 20 amino acids that can be combined in different ways to make different proteins. How the amino acids link, twist, and fold around determine the protein’s function. Thus the same set of amino acids that make up a muscle protein can be reconfigured to enable eyesight in cats.
In 2003, David Baker led a team that arranged these amino acids to form a new protein with a completely new function — a feat many considered impossible. Since then, Dr Baker and his team have come up with a number of new proteins for use in pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and nanomaterials.
The second half of the chemistry prize was split between Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for creating the AI model AlphaFold 2, which could predict the geometric structure of proteins -- an important open problem in biology since 1970. Since its launch, AlphaFold 2 has been able to predict the structures of almost 200 million proteins.
The Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”
Ellen Moons, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, has said the laureates’ work has already been of great benefit in the form of artificial neural networks used in disparate endeavours, from designing aerodynamic bodies to developing materials with new properties.
In this explainer, Vasudevan Mukunth analyses the laureates’ work, in particular highlighting how they draw on insights from biology and statistical mechanics.
The first Nobel Prize announced in 2024, for physiology/medicine, went to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun “for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation”.
The duo discovered microRNA, a then unexpected class of RNA that allowed cells to regulate gene expression after the transcription stage of protein production.
In her explainer, Priyali Prakash delineates how the two researchers found microRNA in the 1-mm-long roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, ascertained the RNA’s unique abilities, and explored its prevalence in the animal kingdom.
Published - October 09, 2024 06:26 pm IST