University of Washington biochemist David Baker has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in “computational protein design.”
He will receive half of the $1.1 million prize; the other half will be split between Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind, who won for “protein structure prediction.”
According to the Nobel announcement, Baker succeeded in using amino acids to design a completely new kind of protein in 2003, which has led to the creation of a whole range of new proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines and more.
The Nobel committee praised him for developing “computerized methods for achieving what many people believed was impossible: creating proteins that did not previously exist and which, in many cases, have entirely new functions.”
When Baker got the call Wednesday morning, he was asleep. “My wife promptly started screaming, so I had a little hard time hearing,” he said. “But then they got the news across.”
He said he was honored to share the prize with Hassabis and Jumper.
“There’s always been two sides to the protein folding problem going from sequence to structure and then back from structure to sequence,” Baker said. “And I think it’s neat that there’s a Noble Prize for them together.”
