2 weeks Ago By William Mata and Nuray Bulbul
A trio of scientists won the Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday, following earlier announcements for the winners in physiology or medicine and physics. The winners of the prestigious prizes - also given for achievements in literature and peace - are being announced from October 7 to 14. The latest prize went to Sir Demis Hassabis, the CEO and co-founder of London-based artificial intelligence startup Google DeepMind, John Jumper, a senior research scientist at the company, and David Baker, a professor at the University of Washington.
Here are all of the 2024 Nobel Prize winners announced so far...
The pair won for their discovery of microRNA. MicroRNA are tiny bits of genetic material that serve as on and off switches inside cells that help control what the cells do and when they do it, AP has reported. If scientists can better understand how they work and how to manipulate them, it could one day lead to powerful treatments for diseases like cancer.
The work by the American scientists is "proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function", according to a panel that awarded the prize in Stockholm. "Their groundbreaking discovery revealed a completely new principle of gene regulation that turned out to be essential for multicellular organisms, including humans," according to the citation explaining the importance of their work. That mechanism has been at work for hundreds of millions of years and has enabled the evolution of complex organisms, it said.
Ambros, currently a professor of natural science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, performed the research at Harvard University. Ruvkun's research was performed at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he's a professor of genetics. The pair won for their work in physics - specifically their discoveries and inventions which have formed the building blocks of machine learning and AI.
Hopfield, of Princeton University, USA, created a network that utilises physics to recognise, save and recreate patterns. “The network as a whole is described in a manner equivalent to the energy in the spin system found in physics, and is trained by finding values for the connections between the nodes so that the saved images have low energy,” a press release explained. Hinton, often dubbed the ‘Godfather of AI’ , is a British-Canadian scientist who works at the University of Toronto.
He used Hopfield’s network to create one of his own, that uses different methods. His invention, the Boltzmann machine, can learn to recognise characteristics in various types of data. By feeding the machine examples that are likely to arise, it can be trained to recognise and classify images, or create new ones.
The trio won the award for their work in chemistry. Sir Demis and Dr Jumper introduced AlphaFold2 in 2020, an AI model the company had developed to help predict the complex structures of proteins. The tool has since been used to anticipate the structure of about 200 million proteins that have been discovered thanks to it.
Scientists from all across the world have been attempting to figure out how a protein folds into a distinct three-dimensional structure since the 1970s. Since its invention, more than two million users from 190 countries have utilised AlphaFold2. It is hoped that understanding how these proteins function could aid in the creation of innovative medications that could help treat conditions including dementia and cancer.
The King knighted Sir Demis in 2024 for his contributions to artificial intelligence. Before earning his PhD in chemistry from the University of Chicago, Dr Jumper obtained an MPhil in theoretical condensed matter physics at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory in 2011. The pair received the honour along with Professor David Baker of the University of Washington, who in 2003 was successful in creating a novel protein by the use of amino acids.
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