The 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry recognized Demis Hassabis, John Jumper, and David Baker for using machine learning to tackle one of biology’s biggest challenges: predicting the 3D shape of proteins and designing them from scratch.
This year’s award stood out because it honored research that originated at a tech company: DeepMind, an AI research startup that was acquired by Google in 2014. Most previous Nobel Prizes in chemistry have been awarded to researchers in academia. Many laureates went on to form startup companies to further expand and commercialize their groundbreaking work — for instance, CRISPR gene-editing technology and quantum dots — but the research, from start to end, wasn’t done in the commercial sphere.
