The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2024 was awarded for outstanding achievements in protein structure research. The laureates were American scientist David Baker and British researchers John Jumper and Demis Hassabis for their contribution to the “unravelling of the code of protein structures.” David Baker was recognised for devising methods to create entirely new types of proteins, an accomplishment scientists had thought to be all but impossible. These new techniques have been exploited to open new horizons in biochemistry and medicine.
On the other hand, John Jumper and Demis Hassabis developed an advanced artificial intelligence model for predicting the complex structures of proteins. The base of this neural network was launched back in 2020, and it represents a serious breakthrough in computational modelling. It has wide applications in areas such as pharmaceuticals and biotechnology.
In this way, David Baker’s 2003 research and the British’s development of neural networks are the cornerstones in understanding and applying protein science. These new developments will deepen our understanding of biological processes at the molecular level and open new perspectives for drug and therapeutic development.
The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2024 went to US scientist John Hopfield and British researcher Geoffrey Hinton for outstanding work in machine learning. John Hopfield was credited with inventing an associative neural network capable of rebuilding whole images from partial, broken, or otherwise corrupted versions. This technology has developed extensive research on how the brain processes information and reconstructs memories.
While Geoffrey Hinton received the same prestige for creating a recurrent neural network that helped greatly in recognizing and analysing specific elements in images and sequences of data, his work during that time has served as the backbone of modern natural language processing methods and those of computer vision.
Their work in the 1980s was foundational to the entire recent boom in AI, both in technological and conceptual underpinning for diverse directions of development in this area. These achievements testified not only to the great role of theoretical research in basic physics and computer science but also underlined the strength of an interdisciplinary approach to scientific discovery.