Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024

Two Nobel prizes this year are in AI, with the physics prize describing how physics led to the invention of artificial neural networks, and the chemistry prize describing how AI predicts protein structure, often considered to be biology.  It's hard to keep up with where the boundary between biology, physics, chemistry and AI is and I wonder how many prizes will be left for non-AI research in the future.

Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and David Baker share the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for protein structure prediction¹.  David, who has a half share of the award, in 2003 first designed a new protein.  In 2020 Demis and John, who share the other half, predicted the structure of 200 million proteins with AI.  Together, this work is now facilitating the design of proteins that will impact our daily lives and health. 

To understand the scale of the impact of protein design and AlphaFold I've made a Nature Navigator topic on all the research articles that mention it.  Over 30k articles mention AlphaFold by over 120k authors, the number of articles grew 62% in 2023 and given that articles lag research significantly the true number of researchers using AlphaFold today is likely to be much higher  - a recent Google Deepmind podcast mentions 1.8m users of the AlphaFold database².   As one would expect, the sub-topics include protein structure and artificial intelligence. Perhaps the most telling sub-topic for the impact these discoveries will have on our lives is the large proportion of work in Disease Mechanisms and Therapeutics.  Here we see AlphaFold used in research covering drug development, neurodevelopmental disorders, viral infections, inflammation and neurodegenerative diseases and cancer.  It's likely the results of this research will touch all of our lives in the coming decade.