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Scientists David Baker, John Jumper and Demis Hassabis have won the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on proteins, the building blocks of life that are found in every cell of the body.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Wednesday announced half of the prize to Baker “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Hassabis and Jumper “for protein structure prediction”.

While Baker built entirely new kinds of proteins, Hassabis and Jumper developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures, said the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

Heiner Linke, chair of the committee, said scientists had long dreamed of predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins.

In 2020, Hassabis and Jumper “managed to crack the code with skilful use of artificial intelligence. They made it possible to predict the complex structure of essentially any known protein in nature,” Linke said.

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