David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper win chemistry Nobel prize for protein prediction

11.08am Split prize

Interestingly this is a split prize for chemistry. One half goes to Jumper and Hassabis and the other half to Baker. The half for Jumper and Hassabis is for their protein structure prediction work with AlphaFold.  When I was at university 20 years ago this problem was presented as virtually unsolvable. The fact that such huge strides have been made is incredibly impressive. AlphaFold and its predictions still aren’t perfect but they’re getting better all the time. One other thing about these AI models. We’re still not exactly sure how they come up with the protein structures that they do. AIs are ‘black boxes’ – researchers feed them data to train them but how they reach the solutions that do is unknown. A recent paper suggested AlphaFold was not solving protein structures from first principles but recognising patterns and motifs in protein structures that were fed to it meaning it can be limited if a protein structure it’s been asked to solve is well outside it’s usual dataset. 

This year’s chemistry laureates Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model, AlphaFold2, to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures.

Check out two examples of protein structures determined using AlphaFold2. First up, a bacterial enzyme… pic.twitter.com/ckIiIAGGMX

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2024

Baker’s half of the prize doesn’t focus on protein structure prediction, although he has been involved in this, but on actually designing proteins from scratch. 

2024 #NobelPrize laureate in chemistry David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins.

In recent years, one incredible protein creation after the other has emerged from Baker’s laboratory. They range from new nanomaterials… pic.twitter.com/ViwzThsIzf

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2024

The way the prize is split means that Baker will receive half of the ~$1 million and Jumper and Hassabis a quarter. 

10.59am Not unexpected, but certainly a popular choice

Sometimes the Nobel prize committee springs a surprise on seasoned prize-watchers. This isn’t one of those occasions. The three – David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper – have been hotly tipped for some years, having won many of the top prizes in chemistry and biology. Their work has enabled the prediction of the structure of proteins from nothing more than its primary structure – the sequence of amino acids of the protein. Understanding the 3D structure of proteins helps researchers to understand their properties and how they interact with other proteins and molecules. The chemistry prize links into the physics prize from yesterday that rewarded the development of machine learning through neural networks. The three used machine learning and neural networks to develop programs – RosettaFold and Google’s AlphaFold – that could produce highly accurate maps of proteins’ structures. Some winners of the chemistry prize have waited 40 years such as lithium-ion battery pioneer John Goodenough, but the committee note that the important work that led to this prize for protein structure prediction was unveiled in 2018 and 2020. 

10.47am Worthy winners

Everyone has been very excited about protein structure prediction and the Nobel committee has awarded the prize very early – they haven’t waited as they sometimes do. 

BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 #NobelPrize in Chemistry with one half to David Baker “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction.” pic.twitter.com/gYrdFFcD4T

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2024

10.44am We’re on time it seems

1 minute!

10.41am Talking about the winners

A reminder that we’ll be running a webinar on Friday afternoon (1500 BST) to take stock of who’s won today and which field was rewarded. We’ll be joined by special guests to talk about the research that won the chemistry prize this year. You can sign up for free.

10.37am Announcement due

The live feed from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has started. 

10.35am From the archives

Stories of future laureates that struggled with the subject that would later make them famous aren’t uncommon (see Tomas Lindahl for instance, but Albert Einstein was good at maths at school contrary to myth). Here’s the teacher of cell biologist John Gurdon, 2012 medicine laureate, recounting the time he got two out of 50 on a test and had a ‘disastrous’ term! There’s hope for all students out there. 

Despite his teacher’s opinion that he couldn’t learn simple biology, John Gurdon went on to receive a #NobelPrize, for his classic frog experiment, which showed that the DNA of mature frog cells has all the information needed to develop all cells in its body.#WorldFrogDay pic.twitter.com/nHp96fYNDp

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) March 20, 2024

10.30am Nearly there

15 minutes until the expected announcement of the new chemistry Nobel laureates. 

10.28am How do you win a second Nobel prize?

Speaking of double Nobel prize winner Barry Sharpless, a bit of Nobel trivia is that only five people have ever won two Nobels – one of them just two years ago, a feat I thought we’d never see the like of again what with the sheer growth in the number of people practising science and the breadth of the scientific enterprise. Philosophy of science researcher Sam McKee takes a look at these five extraordinary people.

10.22am A Nobel puzzle

With just half an hour left before the prize is announced you might want to have a go at our Nobel-themed crossword. If your Nobel knowledge is second to none, our 2024 Nobel prize crossword is just the puzzle for you! 

10.18am How it started; how it’s going

After Barry Sharpless won the chemistry prize a couple of years ago – for the second time – I’m enjoying the new picture on the Sharpless lab’s homepage. Before and after!

10.16am Garbage in, Nobel out

John Trant of the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, points out that there’s hope for everyone whose experiment hasn’t quite gone according to plan: Charles Pedersen wasn’t trying to make the crown ethers for which he got the 1987 Nobel prize, but they turned up in his reaction in 0.4% yield by accident

An upcoming BANGER of a paper starts: Charles Pederson tried to make bis [2-(o-hydroxyphenoxy)ethyl]ether in 1967, but accidentally synthetized dibenzo[18C6] crown ether in a modest 0.4% yield due to impurities in his starting material. 1/2

— John Trant (@trantteam.bsky.social) October 9, 2024 at 4:35 AM

And if you want more on Pedersen, here’s a lovely personal account of his trip to Stockholm to receive the prize as a somewhat frail 83 year old, written by his stepdaughter’s husband Richard Cleaveland. 

10.10am Last year’s leak

Regular readers will recall that last year the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences accidentally revealed the winners of 2023’s Nobel prize in chemistry two hours early. This is believed to be the only time that the winners of the chemistry prize were released early in what is normally a top secret process. In 2010, the winner of the medicine or physiology prize was leaked to a Swedish newspaper, however, after the dossier evaluating Robert Edwards was stolen.

10.07am Decision time

Looks like the committee is meeting and the next winner(s) of the chemistry prize will be decided very shortly.

10.03am Nobel extras

As you might imagine, interviewing 12 Nobel laureates means that you have a fair amount of material that has to be cut. So, while we wait for the prize announcement in just under three-quarters of an hour I’ll be putting out a few of my favourites that we weren’t able to squeeze in.

‘We were going to stop production of fluorescent microscopes’ – Martin Chalfie, 2008 chemistry laureate ’Jean-Pierre Sauvage and Ben Feringa and I are the best of friends’ – Fraser Stoddart, 2016 chemistry laureate ‘There is also a sort of moral obligation to do school visits’ – Richard Henderson, 2017 chemistry laureate ‘Bullying in academia is still going on today’ – Fraser Stoddart, 2016 chemistry laureate

 

9.54am Where do laureates keep their medals?

When we were speaking with chemistry laureates earlier this year, some of them told us where they kept their medals. For security reasons we won’t disclose which laureate said what!

‘Last December, a flood in the basement of my house left the medal unscathed, due to its noble metal composition, but destroyed everything else surrounding [including the case]. The insurance company agreed to pay the astounding cost of replacement that I learned in my subsequent correspondence with Stockholm.’

‘I keep my medal in a safe in a basement.’

‘I thought [the prize] is more for the lab than me. So I gave it to the [Laboratory of Molecular Biology] archive. They’ve got it for now. Fred Sanger gave [the LMB] his two medals and John Kendall left his medal. I’ve given mine in advance; I’m not waiting to die to give it! [The Nobel Foundation] will give you a facsimile medal. It’s gold plated. So I have one of those at home.’

‘It is kept in a safe deposit box (it is solid gold). I do have a replica in my office that I can show to people more easily.

9.48am Haute couture on the lab floor

High fashion and top-flight science might not seem the most likely bedfellows, but the Beckmans College of Design in Sweden has taken inspiration from last year’s prizes to create a range of outfits to ‘explore what laureates, artists and designers have in common’. Apparently, ‘the photographs aim to maintain the playfulness of the creations and, at the same time, elevate them to iconic images,’ according to photographer John Scarisbrick. I’ll take his word for it.

A recap of the prizes last year in case it’s helpful to see if you think the dresses embody the award:

Chemistry – colourful quantum dots for brighter displays

Physics – attosecond pulses of light for studying matter

Physiology or medicine – mRNA vaccines against Covid-19

Literature – John Fosse’s innovative plays and prose

Economics – understanding women’s labour market outcomes

Peace – Narges Mohammadi for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran

9.39am The fate of the Nobel prize medals

Ever wondered what kind of lives Nobel prize medals lead after they’re awarded? For some of them, it’s not just a quiet life gathering dust in a drawer. Some go on to have rather more exciting lives being hidden from Nazis, confiscated by despotic regimes and stolen. And many, particularly over the last decade, have gone under the hammer at auction. We’ve created a data visualisation covering the fate of many of the medals, discovering along the way that they can be worth far more than most would have ever thought possible. There’s a whole lot more in the story on selling off the medals so if you’ve enjoyed stories of medals’ second lives then take a look.

9.28am Ig Nobel science

The award for science that first makes you laugh and then makes you think has been back again this year. The ‘other’ Nobel prize, it rewards the more unorthodox scientific projects such as using drunk worms as a reasonable stand in for polymers when trying to understand how they sort. Other winners this year included the power of painful placebos, pigeon-guided missiles and the suspicious congruence between extremely long-lived people and poor record keeping and pension fraud.

9.24am We’ve got the Nobels covered

You can find all our Nobel prize coverage in one handy place. 

9.15am An alternative chemistry laureate…

It wouldn’t be Nobel prize season without satirical takes on the prize. Last year it was Breaking Bad, this year it’s Tom from YouTube channel Explosions&Fire. 

The 2024 Noble Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to E. F. Tom for the synthesis of a substituted cubane using chemicals from a hardware store. In a shed.
byu/JImmatSci inchemistry

9.08am 100 years ago…

We have an unusual anniversary being celebrated this year. It’s the centenary of the year that no one won the Nobel prize in chemistry. We’ve got the story of what happened.

9.00am Taking the call from Sweden

‘My wife gave me a poke in the ribs and said “There’s a call for you from Stockholm”’ … ‘a high that I likened to 10 double espressos’ … ‘not a prize for the best scientist, or the smartest’. These are some of the reminiscences of the 12 chemistry Nobel prize winners who spoke to us about what it was like to win science’s highest accolade. They shared some wonderful anecdotes with us on what happened the day they won their prize, what effect this whirlwind experience had on their life and work and the advice they wished they’d been given before they won their Nobel. I’ll just leave you with a vignette from one laureate, delivered with perfect timing, who clearly could have been a comedian too. ‘…It was 2.30am in California, when any sane person is fast asleep. I was asleep too.’

8.56am Odds on favourites

This is an old set of predictions from former avid chemistry Nobel prize watcher Paul Bracher, also known by his nom de plume of ChemBark, but still one of the best in my opinion. He really knows his stuff! Bracher put out this set of odds for the chemistry prize in 2022 and it’s notable that several have won since. Carolyn Bertozzi, Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal won the chemistry prize in 2022, Louis Brus, and Alexei Ekimov in 2023 and Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman in 2023 (although they won the medicine prize). One researcher given long odds for a prize, Charles Lieber, maybe ought to have his odds increased even further after he ran into some legal trouble.

8.46am Family connections

Last year we took a look at the academic family tree of laureates to see whether they’re linked to other Nobel prize winners. Perhaps unsurprisingly there does seem to be connection, with Nobel laureates (who usually work at top institutes) mentoring junior researchers that go on to win a Nobel prize. This year, Ambros and Ruvkun were students of Robert Horvitz, who won the 2002 medicine Nobel, alongside Sydney Brenner and John Sulston. And wow, does Horvitz have an impressive list of mentors. He was trained by James Watson (medicine 1962; structure of DNA), Walter Gilbert (chemistry 1980; DNA sequencing) and Sydney Brenner (medicine 2002; cell regulation). And just to add a little more on this topic, Brenner was trained by Cyril Hinshelwood, who won the chemistry prize in 1956. Walter Gilbert is connected to Julian Schwinger (physics 1965; quantum electrodynamics) and Abdus Salam (physics 1979; weak and electromagnetic interactions). Finally, Watson was mentored by John Kendrew (chemistry 1962; structure of globular proteins) and Salvador Luria and Max Delbrück (both medicine 1969; genetic structure of viruses). The genealogy of researchers can be a fascinating topic to delve into and it’s straightforward to make a start.

For the physics prize yesterday’s winner Geoffrey Hinton isn’t directly connected to any Nobel prize winners – he has no laureate ‘parents’ or ‘grandparents’. Equally, John Hopfield has no connections to any Nobel laureates up to his ‘great grandparents’. It may be the branch of physics they work in which has meant they have little linkage to laureates as the physics prize hasn’t recognised many physicists in this field – some physicists were seen complaining yesterday that this was a prize for computer science…

8.37am Crystal-ball gazing

At this time in the morning, we always take a look at who’s the hot tip for this year’s chemistry prize. Number crunchers at Clarivate have been looking at which researchers in chemistry are in the top 0.01% when it comes to citations. Their ‘citation laureates’ this year are John Jumper, director of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind, and biochemist David Baker from the University of Washington. They were picked out for their contributions to predicting protein structure. This work led to the creation of AIs, such as RoseTTAFold and AlphaFold, that surprised the world when they were able to provide highly accurate models of proteins when given nothing more than the protein’s sequence of amino acids. Recent work has suggested that these sorts of Ais, however, aren’t able to predict protein folding from first principles but work off of pattern recognition processes.

Other citation laureates tipped for the chemistry prize were physicists Roberto Car, from Princeton University, US, and Michele Parrinello at the Italian Institute of Technology, for their Car–Parrinello molecular dynamics – a computational technique that enables more efficient simulations of molecular dynamics. Kazunari Domen from the University of Tokyo in Japan, was also selected for his work on light-activated catalysts that harness sunlight to drive water-splitting reactions, a key step in producing green hydrogen. Domen’s work has been influential as his group were able to produce photocatalysts that were able to use almost all the light they absorbed to drive water splitting.

Clarivate has previously had success predicting future laureates by looking at citations, with 75 of their citation laureates going on to win an award at some point – though not usually in the year they’re highlighted. So perhaps don’t expect those above to be winners this year. The Nobel committees that make decisions on who wins a prize have been known to wait decades before awarding a prize – the work by John Goodenough that won him the 2019 chemistry Nobel prize for lithium-ion batteries at the age of 97 was done in 1976.

A poll conducted by ChemistryViews received almost 2000 votes on who its readers think is likely to be the next winner of the Nobel prize in chemistry. Half of voters expect it to be an American biochemist, with most expecting it to be another man too. Out of the many named researchers that readers think might win Chi Huey-Wong is the stand out leader with over 200 votes for his work on synthesis of oligonucleotides. Wong won the 2014 Wolf Prize in Chemistry, often a good predictor of future success (we crunched the numbers last years on which awards are indicators of future success in the chemistry prize). Other top tips (with far fewer votes I note) include next generation sequencing pioneer Shankar Balasubramanian, Karl Deisseroth for optogenetics and biomedical engineer Robert Langer.

Eagled-eyed readers will have noticed a paucity of women in the predictions above (Michele Parrinello is a man too). Women continue to be underrepresented at the top levels of science and this plays out in the Nobel prizes won by women.

 

8.24am Who’s won so far?

Before the chemistry prize is announced, let’s recap who’s won the other science prizes so far. On Monday, Victor Ambros from the University of Massachusetts’ Chan Medical School and Gary Ruvkun from Harvard Medical School won the medicine or physiology Nobel prize ‘for the discovery of a fundamental principle governing how gene activity is regulated’. Ruvkun and Ambros, both students of 2002 medicine laureate Robert Horvitz, discovered that microRNAs can control the production of proteins and are another, surprising layer of gene regulation. The pair won the Lasker award for basic research in 2008 alongside David Baulcombe for work on microRNAs. Lasker awards are seen as a good predictor of a future win of the physiology or medicine Nobel prize. Lasker award winners who have gone on to win a Nobel prize in recent years include John Gurdon, Tu Youyou and Thomas Südhof.

On Tuesday, the physics prize went to John Hopfield and Geoffery Hinton for their work on artificial neural networks that many of us use every day on our smartphones when making use of AI for picture editing or intelligent searches. Their work has also led to cutting edge scientific tools such as protein structure prediction programs such as RosettaFold and AlphaFold.

Just the chemistry prize left now, excitement is building with just over two hours to wait!

8.14am: Welcome to Chemistry World’s coverage of the Nobel prize in chemistry

Morning all, anything interesting happening today? Thanks for joining us for the most eagerly anticipated annual event in the chemistry calendar – the Nobel prize in chemistry. I will be your guide to all the news and events in the run-up to the announcement of the prize at 11.45 CEST/UTC (10.45 BST) at the earliest. We’ll be tweeting from @ChemistryWorld and you can find us on Facebook and LinkedIn too and find me at @PatDWalter. If you have anything you think we should share on this live page then get in touch below the line in the comments or @-us on Twitter, sorry I mean X. You can also watch the prize announcement live on the Nobel Foundation site (cameras usually turn on around 11.40 CEST/10.40 BST). If you’re on Twitter then you’ll want to follow the hashtag #chemnobel and #nobelprize for all the latest developments. We hope you’ll stay with us over the next couple of hours in the run-up to the announcement as we’ll be posting some analysis of the chemistry prize, looking at who’s tipped to win and some Nobel trivia. We’ll also be running a special all-things-Nobel-prize-related edition of our regular Re:action newsletter later today, rounding up the best of our stories and the rest of the web. Following the prize announcement, we’ll also be running a webinar on Friday afternoon (1500 BST). We’ll be joined by special guests to talk about the research that won the chemistry prize this year. You can sign up for free.