American biochemist David Baker, Demis Hassabis, the Chief Executive Office (CEO ) of DeepMind Technologies Limited, a subsidiary of Google, and American chemist John Jumper were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden on 9th October 2024.
- The Nobel Prize is awarded to David Baker “for computational protein design” and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper “for protein structure prediction”.
Prize amount: 11 million Swedish kronor, with one half to David Baker and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper.
Medal of Nobel Prize in Chemistry:
i.The medal was designed by Swedish sculptor and engraver Erik Lindberg. Each medal has a portrait of Alfred Nobel in left profile on the obverse.
ii.The medal depicts the Goddess of Nature, Isis, emerging from clouds and holding a cornucopia. The Genius of Science holds the veil that covers Isis’s face.
iii.The inscription on the medal is “Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes”, which means “It is beneficial to have improved (human) life through discovered arts.
Winners of Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024:
| Nobel Laureate | Awarded for |
|---|---|
| David Baker | for computational protein design |
| Demis Hassabis | for protein structure prediction |
| John Jumper |
About David Baker:
David Baker is the Director of the Institute for Protein Design, Henrietta and Aubrey Davis Endowed Professor in Biochemistry, at the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, the United States of America (USA). He is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland, USA. He was born in 1962, in Seattle.
About Demis Hassabis & John Jumper:
i.Demis Hassabis is the CEO and Co-founder of DeepMind Technologies the British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory based in London, United Kingdom(UK). He was awarded a knighthood for “services to artificial intelligence.” He was born on 27 July 1976 in London, UK.
ii.Dr. John Jumper is a Director at Google DeepMind, London. He was born in 1985 in Little Rock, Arkansas, USA.
About the Discovery:
i.David Bake achieved the feat of building entirely new proteins.
ii.Demis Hassabis & John Jumper developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model to solve a 50-year-old challenge: predicting the complex three-dimensional structures of proteins.
Facts on Nobel Prize in Chemistry:
i.A total of 116 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry have been awarded to 197 laureates between 1901 and 2024.
- As Frederick Sanger and Barry Sharpless won twice, there are 195 individuals who have received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry since 1901.
ii.63 chemistry prizes were presented to a single laureate while 25 were shared by 2 laureates and 28 were shared between 3 laureates.
iii.The 195 individual laureates include 8 women. 2 of these 8 women, Marie Curie and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, were awarded unshared chemistry prizes.
iv.The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was not awarded on 6 occasions in 1916, 1931, 1934, 1940, 1941, and 1942.
Points to Note:
i.Youngest Laureate– Frédéric Joliot received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 at the age of 35 “in recognition of their synthesis of new radioactive elements”. He received the award along with his wife Irène Joliot-Curie.
ii.Oldest Laureate– John B. Goodenough received the prize in 2019 at the age of 97 “for the development of lithium-ion batteries”. He is also the oldest laureate to be awarded in all prize categories.
iii.First Woman- Marie Skłodowska-Curie, a Polish-French physicist and chemist, was the first woman to receive a Nobel prize in Chemistry.
- She received the prize in 1911 “in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element”
iv.The Nobel Prize 2023 for Chemistry was jointly awarded to Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots.
Laureate of Indian origin:
Venkatraman “Venki” Ramakrishnan, an Indian-American biologist, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 “for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”.
- He is a Senior Scientist, Group Leader, and Joint Head of the Structural Studies Division of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK. He was born in 1952 in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu(TN)
About the Nobel Prize:
i.The Nobel Prize is an international award administered by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden, that recognises discoveries and achievements that benefit humanity.
ii.The award is based on the fortune of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish inventor and entrepreneur.
iii.Since 1901, the Nobel Prize has been awarded in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace.
- Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden’s central bank) established the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1968.
Prize Money: Winners of the Nobel Prize will receive a medal, a personal diploma, and a cash award.
- The cash award of Nobel Prize 2024 is set at Swedish kronor (SEK) 11 million per full Nobel Prize.
Click here for Key facts about the Nobel Prize
