STOCKHOLM (AP) — The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded Wednesday to three scientists for their groundbreaking work predicting and even designing the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life.

The prize went to David Baker, who works at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, both of whom work at Google DeepMind, a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory based in London.

Heiner Linke, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said the prize recognized research that established connections between amino acid sequence and protein structure.

“This has actually been described as a major challenge in chemistry and particularly in biochemistry for decades. So it is this breakthrough that is being recognized today,” he said.

Baker designed a new protein in 2003, and his research group has since produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as drugs, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors, according to the Nobel Committee.

“The number of designs they have produced and released and the variety is absolutely stunning. It seems that with this technology you can now construct almost any type of protein,” said Professor Johan Åqvist from the Nobel Committee.

Hassabis and Jumper developed an artificial intelligence model that was able to predict the structure of virtually all of the 200 million proteins that researchers identified, the committee added.

“Proteins are the molecules that make life possible. “Proteins are building blocks that form bones, skin, hair and tissue,” Linke said. “To understand how life works, we first need to understand the shape of proteins.”

Linke said scientists have therefore long dreamed of predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins.

“Four years ago, in 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper managed to crack the code. Through clever use of artificial intelligence, they were able to predict the complex structure of virtually every known protein in nature,” Linke said.

“Another dream of scientists was to build new proteins and learn how to use nature's multitool for our own purposes. That’s the problem that David Baker solved,” he added. “He developed computational tools that now enable scientists to design spectacular new proteins with entirely new forms and functions, opening up endless possibilities for the greatest benefit of humanity.”

Baker said Hassabis and John Jumper's work in artificial intelligence has given his team a huge boost.

“Demis and John’s breakthroughs in protein structure prediction really showed us the power of AI. And that led us to apply these AI methods to protein design, and that significantly increased the performance and accuracy,” he said.

Baker told the Associated Press that the win was exciting. He found out in the early hours of the morning with his wife, who immediately started screaming.

“So it was a little deafening too,” he said.

In a candid conversation with Nobel laureates and journalists attending the announcement in Stockholm, Baker was asked if he had a favorite protein.

He said he loved them all, adding: “So I don't want to pick favorites, but I can tell you about one that we designed during the pandemic that protects against the coronavirus.” And I was very excited about the idea a nasal spray made of small proteins that would protect against all possible pandemic viruses.”

Hassabis is one of Britain's leading technology figures and was knighted earlier this year for his services to artificial intelligence. In 2010, he co-founded the AI ​​research lab DeepMind, which was later acquired by Google. DeepMind's breakthroughs include developing an AI system that mastered the Chinese game of Go and was able to defeat the game's human world champion much faster than expected.

Baker will receive half of the 11 million Swedish krona ($1 million) prize money, while Hassabis and Jumper will share the other half.

Last yearThe chemistry prize went to three scientists for their work on quantum dots – tiny particles just a few nanometers in diameter that can emit very bright colored light and whose everyday applications include electronics and medical imaging.

Six days of Nobel Prizes were announced on Monday as Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun won the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning – John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton – won the prize Physics Prize.

The award ceremony for the literary prize continues on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the Economics Prize on October 14th.

The prize money comes from a bequest from the initiator of the award, the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death.

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Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands.