The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced this year’s recipients of the Nobel Prizes in their respective fields of academics and sciences. This year’s chemistry winners for 2024 are DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and famed chemist John Jumper who are sharing half of the prize with David Baker, head of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington. If Hassabis’ name sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same developer and co-designer of PC games such as Theme Park and Syndicate.
Aside from being a child prodigy at chess and becoming a master of the game, Hassabis graduated from the University of Cambridge with first-class honors in Computer Science. From there, his games career started at Bullfrog Productions, designing Syndicate. At 17, he became the co-designer and lead programmer for the 1994 game Theme Park, working with the game’s designer Peter Molyneux.
While Hassabis and Jumper won the award for “protein structure prediction,” Baker’s contribution was for “computational protein design.” The latter meant engineering entirely new kinds of proteins, designed computationally to perform specific functions within pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and more in the medicinal field.