The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet released the names of the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun “for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation”.
Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were interested in how different cell types develop. They discovered microRNA, a new class of tiny RNA molecules that play a crucial role in gene regulation. Their groundbreaking discovery in the small worm C. elegans revealed a completely new principle of gene regulation. This turned out to be essential for multicellular organisms, including humans. It is now known that the human genome codes for over one thousand microRNAs. Their surprising discovery revealed an entirely new dimension to gene regulation. MicroRNAs are proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was divided, one half awarded to David Baker “for computational protein design”, the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction”.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is about proteins, life’s ingenious chemical tools. David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential.
Proteins generally consist of 20 different amino acids, which can be described as life’s building blocks. In 2003, David Baker succeeded in using these blocks to design a new protein that was unlike any other protein. Since then, his research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.
In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified. 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.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”.
This year’s two Nobel Laureates in Physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning. John Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data. Geoffrey Hinton invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data, and so perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures.
Source: NOBEL PRIZES 2024
See also:
Surprise: 2023 Nobel Prize For mRNA Vaccine
Nobel Prize for Old DNA Sequencing
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