Science Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to Baker, Hassabis and Jumper

This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper from the USA and Great Britain for their research with living proteins. This was announced by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on Wednesday.

One half of the prize goes to biochemist David Baker from the University of Washington in Seattle. He receives the prize for computer-aided protein design. The other half goes to Hassabis and Jumper from the British AI company Google Deepmind for predicting the complex structures of proteins using artificial intelligence.

Since 2023, the prize money per category has amounted to 11 million Swedish kronor, which corresponds to around 910,000 Swiss francs. If the award goes to two or three winners in a category at the same time, they share this sum.

The last time the prize went to Switzerland was seven years ago. The biophysicist Jacques Dubochet from Vaud was awarded the Nobel Prize together with the British scientist Richard Henderson and the German-American Joachim Frank for the cryo-electron microscopy they developed.

After medicine and physics, chemistry is traditionally the third of a total of six prize categories in which the Nobel Prizes are awarded by various institutions in Stockholm and Oslo.

The winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced on Thursday. The announcement for the Nobel Peace Prize will follow on Friday. The series ends next Monday with the Nobel Prize for Economics, sponsored by the Swedish Riksbank. It is the only award that is not based on the will of prize donor and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel.

All awards are presented on December 10, the anniversary of the death of prize donor Alfred Nobel.

SDA