The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry celebrates two groundbreaking achievements in protein science: designing novel proteins and predicting protein structures using AI. David Baker has pioneered techniques to construct entirely new proteins that could serve as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and nanomaterials. Meanwhile, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper’s AI model, AlphaFold2, solved the decades-old challenge of predicting protein structures, allowing researchers to visualize nearly all known proteins. These advancements hold transformative potential for fields like medicine, biotechnology, and environmental science.

Professors John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton have been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for their groundbreaking work on artificial neural networks, which laid the foundation for modern machine learning. Hopfield invented a network that recalls saved images by adjusting its "energy" based on physics principles, while Hinton expanded this model to create the Boltzmann machine, enabling it to classify and generate complex patterns. Their work has catalyzed advancements in AI, shaping tools that learn from data and recognize patterns. These contributions have profoundly influenced both neuroscience and computational science.