Professor Demis Hassabis, who once worked at Lionhead Studios, has been awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He shares the honor with Professor John Jumper and Professor David Baker.
Hassabis is the co-founder of DeepMind, a company specializing in AI research. Together, the scientists developed AlphaFold, a program capable of predicting protein structures. This achievement is one of the most important goals in bioinformatics and theoretical chemistry, and the data produced by AlphaFold will be used in medicine.
Professor Baker will receive half of the Nobel Prize for computational protein design, while Professors Hassabis and Jumper will share the other half for protein structure prediction. In total, the scientists will receive 11 million Swedish kronor.
Since their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries. Among a myriad of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.
Life could not exist without proteins. That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to humankind.
Demis Hassabis worked at Lionhead Studios, where he helped develop the artificial intelligence for Black & White. Later, he left the team to found Elixir Studios, where he released Republic: The Revolution and Evil Genius.