From Chess to AI to Neural Network to Chemistry Nobel Prize 2024

Prof Homendra Naorem
As the festive season begins in India, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Octo- ber 9, 2024 that the Chemistry Nobel Prize 2024 will be shared by David Baker of University of Washington, Seattle, USA (half the prize money) and Demis Hassabis and John M Jumper of Google Deep-Mind, London, UK (the remaining half) in recognition of their pioneering works on computational protein design and protein structure prediction respectively.
The medal and the prize money will be presented personally to the winners during a solemn ceremony to be held on Dec 10, 2024, the death anniversary of the Alfred Nobel, the noble multi-millionaire Chemist who instituted the most prestigious prize on the earth. Paradoxical as it may appear, all the three winners of this year’s Chemistry Nobel prize had no initial formal training in conventional Chemistry, not even theoretical quantum Chemistry calculations!
David Baker who studied Philosophy and Social Science at Harward University transitioned to Biology in his final years when he developed interest in cell biology after reading the textbook Molecular Biology of the Cell as part of the course in evolutionary biology. Eventually, he earned his PhD from University of California, Berkley studying the protein transport in yeast. Fascinated by the nature of protein folding, he started investigating how different sequences of amino acids form variety of proteins with definite structure as found in cells. Demis Hassabis, on the other hand, is a child prodigy in chess who played at master level at the tender age of 13 and is a successful programmer and game developer. He is a co-founder of DeepMind, a company that developed masterful AI models for popular boardgames. He also studied brain and neuroscience in order to deve- lop better neural networks using Artificial Intelligence (AI).
John Jumper earned his PhD in Physics from University of Cambridge. He then started developing simulation methods for protein dynamics but soon shifted to computational biology where he applied machine learning to explore the physics of protein folding. He then joined Google’s DeepMind, an AI development company, in 2017 as a research scientist working on AlphaFold, which can predict the 3-D structure of proteins using machine learning algorithms. Despite coming from different backgrounds, they all had one common interest-PROTEIN-designing of new proteins and predicting their structure using computer algorithms using machine learning and AI.
Inexplicable as it is, life is composed of lifeless chemicals, among which proteins are perhaps the most important ones since they perform the major structural and functional aspects of the living system. The major constituents of proteins are Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen with Sulfur and Phosphorous sometimes as minor constituents. From the prism of Chemistry, proteins are polymers formed by various arrangements of 20 different monomer units which are known as amino acids. Amino acids are simple organic (carbon) compounds with an amine (-NH2) and an acid (-COOH) group covalently linked to a central carbon atom (known as the a carbon) which is also bonded to one alkyl R group. In fact, the term amino acid is short form of a-amino carboxylic acid. Two or more amino acids will polymerize by combining the a-acid group of one amino acid with the a-amine group of another amino acid to form a peptide bond (-CO-NH-) with the elimina- tion of a water molecule. Depending upon the num-ber of amnio acids poly- merized, they are known as dipeptide, tripeptide, or oligopeptide when there are about 20 amino acids and polypeptides with about 50 amino acids. When the number of amino acids in the polymer is more than 50, they are known as proteins. (To be contd)