Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein design and AlphaFold
Result confirmed
Importance: historic (5 of 5)The takeaway
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded half to David Baker for computational protein design and half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind for protein structure prediction with AlphaFold.
Status
- Claim
Result confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Verification
- Unverified claim
- Importance
- Historic (5 of 5)
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
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Key facts
- Announced 9 October 2024
- Half to David Baker (University of Washington) ‘for computational protein design’
- Half to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper ‘for protein structure prediction’
- First Nobel Prize awarded for an AI system’s scientific achievement
What happened
The Nobel committee honored AlphaFold, which predicted the structures of virtually all ~200M known proteins.
Why it matters
Confirmed AI as a tool of first-rank scientific discovery, less than four years after AlphaFold 2.
Sources
3 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
3 sources: 2 primary, 1 reaction
Primary
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 press release (NobelPrize.org)nobelprize.org, official
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 summary (NobelPrize.org)nobelprize.org, official
Reactions
- Wikipedia: Demis Hassabisen.wikipedia.org, discussion
Changes
- Added science block (science & math tab)
- Filed