The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was half awarded to David Baker and half award jointly to Demis Hassabis & John M. Jumper. Baker is American from the University of Washington. Hassabis and Jumper are both British and work at Deepmind Technologies, a Google subsidiary. In a statement, the committee said that the part of the award given to David Baker was "for computational protein design." The other jointly awarded half to Demis Hassabis & John M. Jumper was "for protein structure prediction."
Their work on proteins has profoundly broadened our understanding of life's "building blocks." Back in 2003, David Baker combined amino acids (the base components of proteins) to design imaginative and new proteins that were unlike any other. Today, these innovative new proteins can be utilized in vaccines and pharmaceuticals, incredibly tiny sensor, and nanomaterials.
Demis Hassabis and John Jumper's big breakthrough occured in 2020. They solved a 50-year-old chemistry problem: trying to accurately predict protein structures from the component amino acids of which they are made. Researches have used this applicaton to create images of plastic-decomposing enzymes or understand more fully how things are antibiotic resistent.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton. Hopfield is American and Hinton is British-Canadian. In a statement, the committee said that the award was given "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks."
Their work creating machine learning models was based on equations from physics. Hopfield worked on ways that networks can store information, access it later, and reconstruct that information, similar to how our brains store information. Hinton invented methodology that can discover properties within data sets. This type of methodology is currently at work in large neural networks like ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun. They are both from the United States. In a statement, the committee said that the award was given "for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation."
Their work helped to further our understanding of gene regulation. All of the cells in our body contain the same chromosomes and the same set of genes. These act as instruction manual for our cells. But if every cell has the same exact instrutions, how do cells specialize into differing type? Think of the difference between muslce cells versus nerve cells. Thanks to Ambros and Ruvkun, we now better understand that gene regulation selects and activates only the correctly relevent set of instructions for cell delevopment. This complex developmental process must proceed according to our changing bodily conditions so that we don't end up with too many intestinal cells compared to nerve cells, and so on. Fascinating!
