Nobel chemistry prize honors AlphaFold and David Baker

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind for protein structure prediction with AlphaFold, and half to David Baker of the University of Washington for computational protein design.

Why it mattered It was the first Nobel awarded for what an AI system produced, treating AlphaFold’s structure predictions as a standard tool of working biology.