Google DeepMind co-founder shares Nobel Chemistry Prize

David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work on proteins.

Demis Hassabis co-founded the artificial intelligence research company that became Google DeepMind.

Proteins are the building blocks of life and are found in every cell in the human body.

Better understanding of proteins has driven huge breakthroughs in medicine.

Professor David Baker, based in the US, used amino acids to design a new protein, opening the door to the creation of new proteins used in pharmaceuticals, vaccines and other tools.

Prof Baker told the committee shortly after the announcement that he was “very excited and very honoured”.

“I stood on the shoulders of giants,” he said when asked how he had cracked the code of creating proteins.

He said he was sleeping when the phone rang, and when the announcement was made, his wife “starting screaming very loudly” in excitement.

UK-based Demis Hassabis and John Jumper used artificial intelligence to predict the structures of almost all known proteins and created a tool called AlphaFold2.

The committee called it a “complete revolution” in chemistry, used by 200 million people worldwide.

The announcement was made by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at a press conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

The winners share a prize fund worth 11m Swedish kronor (£810,000). Prof Baker will receive half of the award, with the remaining half going to Mr Hassabis and Mr Jumper.