AI WINS A NOBEL
In October, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three researchers for their AI-accelerated breakthroughs in the science of proteins, whose structures are so complex that each one previously required years of work for researchers to decode. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper, two computer scientists at Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence lab, for building AlphaFold, an algorithm that has correctly predicted—within minutes—the structure of almost all 200 million proteins currently known to occur in nature. The duo shared the award with David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington whose Rosetta AI model can design wholly novel proteins with new biological functions, an achievement that was until recently strictly a plot point in science fiction.
