“I don’t think the committee had our phone numbers,” said Sir Demis Hassabis.
He found out he’d won the Nobel Prize for chemistry – but the Swedish awards committee had a hard job letting him know.
They ended up phoning Sir Demis’s wife on Microsoft Teams, who was working and repeatedly ignored them.
“Eventually about the third or fourth call, she decided to answer it,” he said.
Google DeepMind boss Sir Demis and his colleague Dr John Jumper, as well as the US’ Dr David Baker, have just won the Nobel Prize for chemistry for their work in artificial intelligence and biology.
Sir Demis and Dr Jumper, both based in London, won for their groundbreaking work in predicting protein structures.
The AI model they developed, AlphaFold, can accurately predict the structure of millions of proteins, which are found in every living thing around us.
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Their work could have a “truly huge” impact in developing medicines, vaccines and improving human health, according to the Nobel committee.
“An experiment that takes about a year for a PhD student to do, AlphaFold will predict the answer in a few minutes,” said Dr Jumper, talking to Sky News after a whirlwind day.
He’d expected to spend Wednesday just “writing a bit of code”, instead he was in back-to-back interviews with the world’s media and just like Sir Demis, Dr Jumper was taken aback when he found out he’d just won the Nobel Prize.
“I knew that the call [to say you’d won] went about an hour before the press conference,” he said. “It had got to 30 minutes before the press conference and I said, ‘Okay, not this year’.”
Dr Jumper is 39 years old, making him the youngest chemistry laureate in 70 years.
“After I told my wife, ‘Well, not this year’, I got a phone call from Sweden and it was… exceptional and unbelievable.
“The look on my wife’s face was my favourite part… Other than getting the Nobel Prize.”
Sir Demis and Dr Jumper announced AlphaFold2 in 2020 and have now been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified, according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences who award the prizes.
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Because of their work, scientists now better understand things like antibiotic resistance and have even created images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.
The potential for their AI tool to change the world is not lost on Dr Jumper.
“As excited as I’ve been to receive the Nobel [Prize], I’ll be just as excited when the first Nobel is given for discoveries that used AlphaFold – when it’s the basis of other people’s Nobel worthy work,” he said.
However, there are some people concerned about the risks of technology like AlphaFold, the worry is that this kind of technology could be used to create things like bioweapons or to enhance viruses.
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This year, a group of scientists, including Dr Baker, called for safeguards to be built into AI technology working with proteins.
“We just need to be cautiously optimistic about what we’re doing,” said Sir Demis.
“Being bold with applying it to the good use cases, but also trying to mitigate where we can the risks.”
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The winning trio will now share a prize of 11 million Swedish kroner (around £810,000).
