STOCKHOLM — US scientists David Baker and John Jumper and Briton Demis Hassabis won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday (Oct 9) for work on decoding the structure of proteins and creating new ones, yielding advances in areas such as drug development.

Half the prize was awarded to Baker "for computational protein design" while the other half was shared by Hassabis and Jumper "for protein structure prediction", said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which makes the award.

Baker, 62, is a professor at the University of Washington, in Seattle, while Hassabis, 48, is CEO of Google DeepMind, the AI research subsidiary of Google, where Jumper, 39, also works as senior research scientist.

Hassabis and Jumper utilised artificial intelligence to predict the structure of almost all known proteins, while Baker learned how to master life's building blocks and create entirely new proteins, the award-giving body said.

"It's totally surreal to be honest, quite overwhelming," Hassabis told Reuters, thanking DeepMind and Google, and his colleague Jumper.

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