The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has declared the Nobel Prizes for 2024.
Physics
John J. Hopfield
Princeton University, NJ, USA
Geoffrey E. Hinton
University of Toronto, Canada
“for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”
The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded for advancements in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
Chemistry
One half to
David Baker
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA
“for computational protein design”
and the other half jointly to
Demis Hassabis
Google DeepMind, London, UK
John M. Jumper
Google DeepMind, London, UK
“for protein structure prediction”
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.
Literature
The Nobel for literature has gone to the Korean author, Han Kang.
for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life
Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to an organisation – Nihon Hidankyo (Japan)
The two American atomic bombs that were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. It is estimated that 650 000 people survived the attacks. These survivors are known as Hibakusha in Japanese.
In 1956, local Hibakusha associations along with victims of nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific formed The Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organisations, shortened in Japanese to Nihon Hidankyo.
Nihon Hidankyo has two main objectives. The first is to promote the social and economic rights of all Hibakusha, including those living outside Japan. The second is to ensure that no one ever again is subjected to the catastrophe that befell the Hibakusha.
Through personal witness statements, Nihon Hidankyo has carried out extensive educational work on the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the use of nuclear weapons. Hence the motto “No more Hibakusha”.
The content and images for this story have been taken from the official press releases of the Nobel Prize committee. More details can be found at the website.