The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their work with proteins.
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00:00The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has today decided to award the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
00:08with one half to David Baker, University of Washington, USA for computational protein design
00:17and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Jamper, Google DeepMind United Kingdom
00:26for protein structure prediction. Well I was sleeping when the phone rang and I answered
00:34the phone and I heard the announcement and then my wife began streaming very loudly so I couldn't
00:42really hear very well and the very nice person who was talking to me told me to go somewhere
00:49where I could actually listen and I think it was very very exciting and I think it's good
00:55it's turning out to be quite a unique special day. I've been working on protein design for a number
01:01of years and really with the breakthroughs made by Demis and John on protein structure prediction
01:10really highlighted to us the power that AI could have. So there's no connection between the prizes
01:17each Nobel Prize is completely on its own feet and this one is about really biochemical
01:21breakthroughs. The connection that exists is that the foundational research in physics that
01:28was awarded yesterday, how to do deep learning, is part of the breakthrough how to crack the code
01:34of protein structure prediction. So this is an application of artificial intelligence and I would
01:40say an exemplary application in the sense that it addresses a really important problem in a really
01:46responsible way and a very well controlled way.