- Title: Nobel chemistry winner Baker hopes his work will make the world "a better place"
- Date: 9th October 2024
- Summary: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, UNITED STATES (OCTOBER 9, 2024) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) PROFESSOR DAVID BAKER, WINNER OF NOBEL CHEMISTRY PRIZE, SAYING: "Oh, very excited and very honored and really excited to, you know, thank everyone who contributed to to all of this work." WHITE FLASH (SOUNDBITE) (English) PROFESSOR DAVID BAKER, WINNER OF NOBEL CHEMISTRY PRIZE, SAYING: "I w
- Embargoed: 23rd October 2024 13:25
- Keywords: Chemistry David Baker Nobel
- Location: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, UNITED STATES
- City: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, UNITED STATES
- Country: US
- Topics: North America,Science
- Reuters ID: LVA001052109102024RP1
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: U.S. Scientists David Baker and John Jumper and Briton Demis Hassabis won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday (October 9) for work on decoding the structure of proteins and creating new ones, yielding advances in areas such as drug development.
Half the prize was awarded to Baker "for computational protein design" while the other half was shared by Hassabis and Jumper "for protein structure prediction", said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which makes the award.
"The work is very directed at solving problems, and so when we design a new protein we are always thinking what medical problem or what environmental problem are we trying to solve," Baker said in an early morning interview.
Baker, 62, is a professor at the University of Washington, in Seattle, while Hassabis, 48, is CEO of Google DeepMind, the AI research subsidiary of Google where Jumper, 39, also works as senior research scientist.
Baker said he was asleep when the phone rang around 2 a.m. local time (0900gmt) and he got the announcement.
"The phone rang and they started telling me about the prize and my wife started screaming very loudly. And so it was it was a little chaotic at the beginning, but it was very exciting," Baker said.
In 2003, Baker was able to use amino acids, often described as life's building blocks, to design a new protein that was unlike any existing one, the academy said.
That opened the door to the rapid creation of different proteins for uses in areas such as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and even tiny sensors.
"I am hopeful now that having the Nobel Prize will add to our capabilities to actually to do transformative things moving forward," Baker said.
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