University of Chicago Alum Wins Nobel Prize In Chemistry: Details Here
Study in US: An alum of the University of Chicago is among the three scientists who have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They received this award for their work on "protein structure prediction."
University of Chicago alum and co-inventor of AlphaFold John Jumper shares the Nobel Prize with two more scientists for their work on an AI model to predict protein structures.
The other scientists who share the Nobel Prize with him are Demis Hassabis and Prof. David Baker of the University of Washington. John Jumper and the two other scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on October 9 for creating an AI model for protein prediction. They were honoured by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
In 2012, Jumper received his master's degree and in 2017 he did his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. While he was doing his Ph.D, his thesis was on a similar topic where he worked on how to apply machine-learning techniques to research protein dynamics. During his thesis work, he was mentored by Profs. Karl Freed and Tobin Sosnick, next he became a postdoctoral researcher in Sosnick’s lab and then moved to Google Deepmind.
Jumper is 100th scholar of UChicago to get Nobel Prize
While commenting on this, Jumper said, "It's absolutely extraordinary. I’ve been a computational biologist a long time, and I like to say in talks: we need this to work. We need computation to solve the problems of biology, and I just love that it’s starting to work."
The AI model is called the AlphaFold system. Google DeepMind released this and Jumper and Hassabis are co-inventors of this model.
The Nobel Committee stated, "They have utilised artificial intelligence to successfully solve a problem that chemists wrestled with for over 50 years: predicting the three-dimensional structure of a protein from a sequence of amino acids."
"Scientists around the world have painstakingly assembled the genetic sequences for everything from corn to E. coli to humans. But the genetic sequence is only a starting point—most of the work in a cell is done by proteins, which are created from the genetic sequence but then folded into complex 3-D configurations to carry out their functions. Knowing the shapes of the proteins is crucial for understanding how cells work and, for example, designing drugs to work on diseases. But predicting how a protein would fold based solely on its genetic data remained elusive for decades," reads the official statement of the university.
AlphaFold open-source version was released in 2021
The company released an open-source version of the model in 2021. This proved to be exceptionally good in predicting the protein shapes and later it was used by over half a million researchers which resulted in scores of copies on pressing topics of crop resilience and antibiotic resistance.
Jumper said, "What I love about all of this is…we could draw a straight line from what we do to people being healthy because of what we learn about biology in the cell and everything else, and it’s just extraordinary."
In 2023, Sosnick wrote, "Following the July 2021 online publication of AlphaFold, I sent my colleagues an email with the subject line 'Revolution in structural biology'...The expression "I alphafolded it" is now something I hear almost every day, whether in the lab, during a thesis defense, or at a scientific conference. This transformation of a noun into a verb, akin to the phrase, "I googled it," mirrors the revolution that has occurred in biological sciences over the past two and a half years."
UChicago alum winning Nobel Prize: More Details
Before Jumper, last year Noble Prize was awarded to Moungi Bawendi, PhD’88 for quantum dots discovery, John Goodenough got 2019 prize for the invention of lithium batteries in 2019.
"What a joy to see our alumni, John Jumper and Moungi Bawendi, recognized with Nobel Prizes two years in a row!. Dr. Jumper's Nobel recognition is a testament to the pioneering research conducted at UChicago chemistry, leading to real-world impacts, and the success of our mission to train future leaders in the field of chemistry," Prof. Jiwoong Park, chair of UChicago's Department of Chemistry.
Jumper is all set to deliver a lecture on "so we’re looking forward to welcoming him back to campus next year," at the 2025 Bloch Lecture at UChicago.
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