Scientists won the chemistry prize for their work
The Nobel Prize for Chemistry is a Promising Tools of Life, not a Component of the Scientific Intelligence: Comment on Hinton’s Post-Award Interview
The cash prize of $1 million is the result of a bequest from the award’s creator. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. The prize was won by two of the founding fathers of machine learning.
The chemistry award went to three scientists for work on quantum dots,tiny particles just a few centimeters in diameter that release bright colored light and can be used in medical and electronics.
“Another dream of scientists has been to build new proteins to learn how to use nature’s multi-tool for our own purposes. This is the problem that David Baker solved,” he added. “He developed computational tools that allow scientists to design spectacular newproteins with entirely novel shapes and functions, opening endless possibilities for the greatest benefit to humankind.”
Hassabis and Jumper created an artificial intelligence model that is able to predict the structure of almost all 200 million copies of a particular molecule, according to the committee.
The committee that selects the winners of the chemistry’s prize says it’s a reflection of the “chemical tools of life.” Two of the three scientists who received the prize today are important figures at Google DeepMind.
“If there was a Nobel Prize for computer science, our work would clearly be more appropriate for that,” Hinton said in a post-award interview with The New York Times. “But there isn’t one.” When commended for his comment by the Times, Hinton added that it was “also a hint.”
The AlphaFold Prize: An Accelerator for Bioinformatics and Biomechanics, with an Emphasis on Proteins and Folds
The impact of AlphaFold, which was unveiled just a few years ago, has been nothing short of transformative. The tool has enabled experiments that were not possible a decade ago, and made some of the most precise and accurate structures available to researchers at the touch of a button. Christine Orengo is a Computational Biologist at University College London who uses AlphaFold to uncover new genes.
Baker and his team have been using the model of Rosetta to design and predict novel proteins, as well as predict the structure of genes.
“It has long been a dream to learn to predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins from knowing their amino acid sequences … for several decades, this was considered impossible,” said Nobel committee chair Heiner Linke, who researches nanoscience at Lund University in Sweden, during the prize announcement. This year’s laureates “have cracked the code”, he added. The three winners will share a large prize pot.
One team used the tool to map the nuclear pore complex, one of our cell’s largest machines that transports molecules out of the nucleus. Last year two teams mined the entire AlphaFold Database to discover new families ofProtein and folds in the darker corners of the protein universe.
Although computational tools such as AlphaFold aren’t a replacement for experimental studies, they are an accelerator, scientists say. “This is going to empower a new generation of molecular biologists to ask more advanced questions,” CASP judge Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, told Nature in 2020.
