one year on
Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to AI protein-folding pioneers Hassabis, Jumper and Baker
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honors the developers of AlphaFold and computational protein design.
For the first time — and likely not the last — a scientific breakthrough enabled by artificial intelligence has been recognized with a Nobel prize. The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded this morning to Sir Demis Hassabis and Dr. John Jumper of Google DeepMind for developing AlphaFold, the AI system that predicts protein 3D structures from amino acid sequences, alongside David Baker of the University of Washington for his work on computational protein design.
AlphaFold’s predictions, made freely available through the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, have already been used by more than two million researchers from 190 countries. The AlphaFold 2 paper, published in Nature in 2021, remains one of the most-cited publications of all time.
Hassabis said the prize ‘is the honour of a lifetime,’ while Jumper called it ‘a key demonstration that AI will make science faster.’ The field now watches to see whether AI’s scientific promise will continue to deliver breakthroughs at Nobel pace.
The record
Called the Nobel 'the honour of a lifetime' and said AlphaFold is 'the first proof point of AI's incredible potential to accelerate scientific discovery'
Thanked the Academy and called the award a demonstration that 'AI will make science faster and ultimately help to understand disease and develop therapeutics'
One year later — open only if you can handle spoilers
AlphaFold's Nobel is now seen as the moment AI research fully crossed into scientific establishment. The award accelerated government and industry investment in AI-driven drug discovery, with hundreds of startups and partnerships forming in the following two years, though many warned that translating structural predictions into approved therapies would take a decade or more.