The Noblest Prize

Although we've seen Demis Hassabis on this blog almost a dozen times, it's been a few years since the last time -- Beyond AlphaZero (September 2019) -- and even then it was just in passing. What has the chess player turned entrepreneur been doing since then?

Accelerating scientific discovery with AI (29:01) • '[Published on] Dec 16, 2024'

The description of the video says,

Nobel lecture with the Nobel Laureate in Chemistry 2024 Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind, London, UK. Introduction by Johan Aaqvist, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. From: The Nobel Lectures 2024, 2024-12-08.

The description then points to a press release from early October: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024: They cracked the code for proteins' amazing structures (kva.se; 'The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences'). It starts,

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 with one half to David Baker, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA "for computational protein design" and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind, London, UK and John Jumper, Google DeepMind, London, UK "for protein structure prediction".

That introduction is followed by an explanation of the science involved:-

The diversity of life testifies to proteins’ amazing capacity as chemical tools. They control and drive all the chemi­cal reactions that together are the basis of life. Proteins also function as hormones, signal substances, antibodies and the building blocks of different tissues.

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