Cypriot British scientist Demis Hassabis won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, alongside US scientists David Baker and John Jumper, for their work in decoding the structure of proteins and creating new ones.
Hassabis is CEO of Google DeepMind, the AI research subsidiary of Google, where Jumper works as a senior research scientist.
His father is a Greek Cypriot and mother a Singaporean, and he grew up in North London.
Hassabis and Jumper created an artificial intelligence model that has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.
The 48-year-old spoke with Reuters after his award win.
“It’s totally surreal to be honest, quite overwhelming,” Hassabis said, thanking DeepMind and Google, and his colleague Jumper.
“David Baker, we’ve got to know in the last few years, and he’s done some absolutely seminal work in protein design. So it’s really, really exciting to receive the prize with both of them.”
This is the second award handed out this week for work involving artificial intelligence, an area Hassabis is passionate about, having previously been a video game AI programmer and designer.
“That’s always been my passion, but … it’s like any powerful general-purpose technology, it can be used for harm as well if put in the wrong hands and used for the wrong ends,” Hassabis said.
The prize, widely regarded as among the most prestigious in the scientific world, is worth 11 million Swedish crowns (over $1.5 million AUD).
