Google DeepMind scientists Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry today.
The duo will share the prestigious award, considered the pinnacle of scientific achievement, with University of Washington Professor David Bakker for their work on computational protein design.
“This prize represents the promise of computational biology,” Jumper said during a press conference Wednesday.
Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2014. Jumper was named director last year. The duo won their Nobel Prize for developing an AI model that solved a 50-year-old challenge in biology: predicting the structure of proteins.
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The tool, called AlphaFold2, can predict over 200 million protein structures – almost all known to science – based on their amino acid sequences.
This allows researchers to understand how proteins function and interact with other molecules in the body, providing unprecedented insight into disease development and drug development.
The effect of AlphaFold2
Since its launch, AlphaFold2 – which is freely available – has been used by more than 2 million scientists in 190 countries. It has supported numerous areas of research, from projects on malaria vaccines and Parkinson's treatments to drug-resistant bacteria.
The immediate impact of AlphaFold2 is to accelerate research, Jumper said during the press conference.
“I think that through our work we will soon get better and better at using biology and our understanding of biology to make drugs,” he added. “I hope that this will ultimately lead to us being able to respond better to pandemics, for example.”
Hassabis said he has dedicated his life to AI because it can “improve the lives of billions of people.” However, he warned that artificial intelligence can do both good and bad.
“As these systems and techniques become more powerful, we need to think really hard about how we can enable and strengthen all the benefits and good use cases while mitigating the risks.”
As artificial intelligence changes the face of fundamental science, the Nobel Prize in Physics was also awarded to two AI researchers: John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their work training neural networks using physics.
