University of Cambridge alumni Sir Demis Hassabis and Dr John Jumper awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024
University of Cambridge alumni Sir Demis Hassabis and Dr John Jumper have been jointly awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing an AI model that predicts the complex structures of proteins.
In 2020, Sir Demis and Dr Jumper of Google DeepMind presented an AI model called AlphaFold2, which has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified, solving a 50-year challenge.
AlphaFold2 has since been used by more than a million people from 190 countries, for a host of scientific applications.
Researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.
They received the Nobel Prize along with Prof David Baker, of the University of Washington, who succeeded in using amino acids to design a new protein in 2003.
Sir Demis described it as “an unbelievable honour of a lifetime to receive the Nobel Prize”.
He said: “I’ve dedicated my whole life to advancing AI, because I really believe in the potential it has to improve the lives of billions of people.
“When we look back on on AlphaFold, it will be the first proof point of AI’s incredible potential to accelerate scientific discovery.
“And it is that potential that really got me into AI in the first place. I see AI as, potentially, the ultimate tool for accelerating science and scientific knowledge.”
But in a new conference after the announcement, he also warned artificial intelligence in the wrong hands could be “used for harm”.
Sir Demis said: “We have to really think very hard – as these systems and techniques get more powerful – about how to enable and empower all of the amazing benefits and good use cases whilst mitigating against the bad use cases and the risks.”
He said while today’s AI systems are not dangerous, that might change in the future as these technologies get more advanced and acquire “human level” intelligence.
“We are going to have to be more and more cognisant of these risks and we need to start the research on that in a really big way so that we are prepared for that,” said Sir Demis.
A child chess prodigy, he designed and programmed the multimillion-selling game Theme Park in his teens before reading computer science as an undergraduate at Queens' College, Cambridge, matriculating in 1994. He completed a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London and created the videogame company Elixir Studios.
In 2010, he co-founded DeepMind, a company that developed masterful AI models for popular boardgames and which was sold to Google in 2014.
Two years later, DeepMind achieved what many then considered to be the holy grail of AI by beating the champion player of one of the world’s oldest boardgames, Go.
In 2014, Sir Demis was elected as a fellow benefactor and, later, as an honorary fellow of Queens' College and he was knighted in 2024 for services to artificial intelligence.
The University of Cambridge established a DeepMind chair of machine learning in 2018, thanks to a benefaction from Sir Demis’ company, and appointed Professor Neil Lawrence to the position the following year.
At the time, Sir Demis said: “I have many happy memories from my time as an undergraduate at Cambridge, so it’s now a real honour for DeepMind to be able to contribute back to the Department of Computer Science and Technology and support others through their studies.”
Prof Alastair Beresford, head of the Department of Computer Science and Technology and Robin Walker fellow in computer science at Queens’, said: “It is wonderful to see Demis’s work recognised at the highest level — his contributions have been really transformative across many domains. I’m looking forward to seeing what he does next!”
Dr Jumper completed an MPhil in theoretical condensed matter physics at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory in 2008, while a member of St Edmund’s College. He received his PhD in chemistry from the University of Chicago.
"Computational biology has long held tremendous promise for creating practical insights that could be put to use in real-world experiments," said Dr Jumper, director of Google DeepMind, in a statement released by the company. "AlphaFold delivered on this promise. Ahead of us are a universe of new insights and scientific discoveries made possible by the use of AI as a scientific tool."
St Edmund’s College master Prof Chris Young said: “The whole of the St Edmund’s community joins me in congratulating our former masters student Dr John Jumper on this illustrious achievement – the most inspiring example imaginable to our new generation of students as they go through their matriculation this week.”
The winners share a prize fund worth 11 million Swedish kronor (£810,000).
Their award follows the announcement on Tuesday that Geoffrey Hinton, another alumnus of the University of Cambridge, had been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with John Hopfield of Princeton University.
Prof Deborah Prentice, vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said: “I’d like to congratulate Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who, alongside Geoffrey Hinton yesterday, are all alumni of our university. Together, their pioneering work in the development and application of machine learning is transforming our understanding of the world around us. They join an illustrious line-up of Cambridge people to have received Nobel Prizes – now totalling 125 individuals – for which we can be very proud.”
The Nobel Prize was applauded at EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) on the Wellcome Genome Campus at Hinxton.
Ewan Birney, deputy director general of EMBL and director of EMBL-EBI, said: “Huge congratulations to David Baker, Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and the teams that supported them for this fantastic honour.
“Tools such as AlphaFold help us understand protein structure, helping us decode how life works; being able to design proteins to our own needs shows how deep our understanding has reached. Such tools are built on decades of experimental work and made possible thanks to a culture inside molecular biology of openly sharing data worldwide.
“There is a vast treasure trove of public data available in databases such as the ones managed by EMBL. We hope to see these data informing yet more discoveries. The potential of big data alongside AI and technology developments is limitless - and this is the start.”
Sameer Velankar, PDBe and AlphaFold database team leader at EMBL-EBI, added: “It’s wonderful to see the Nobel Prize acknowledging computational protein design and protein structure prediction. Structural biology has truly been reinvigorated by the latest generation of AI tools. Tools such as AlphaFold would not have been possible without the vast volumes of experimental data that researchers have been generating for decades, and sharing openly in databases such as the ones managed by EMBL.
“EMBL has collaborated with Google DeepMind to make over 200 million AlphaFold2 protein structure predictions openly available for anyone to use through the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database. The usage of the database speaks for itself, with over one million users spanning nearly every country. AlphaFold has revolutionised life science research. I’ve never seen anything like it and we are only at the beginning of understanding its impact for science and society.”