The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry celebrates two groundbreaking achievements in protein science: designing novel proteins and predicting protein structures using AI. David Baker has pioneered techniques to construct entirely new proteins that could serve as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and nanomaterials. Meanwhile, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper’s AI model, AlphaFold2, solved the decades-old challenge of predicting protein structures, allowing researchers to visualize nearly all known proteins. These advancements hold transformative potential for fields like medicine, biotechnology, and environmental science.
