Well deserved! Especially for Alphafold. It is the most impactful invention in structural biology this century along with Cryo-EM.
It doesn't deserve a Chemistry Nobel prize. It deserves a prize about computers.
Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
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Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
#62The physics prize was a stretch of the definition of the word "physics", but this one is purely about chemistry.
Not purely. It includes a software development about Chemistry.
Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
#63Here's a direct quote from the Alphafold paper: "These authors contributed equally: John Jumper, Richard Evans, Alexander Pritzel, Tim Green, Michael Figurnov, Olaf Ronneberger, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Russ Bates, Augustin Žídek, Anna Potapenko, Alex Bridgland, Clemens Meyer, Simon A. A. Kohl, Andrew J. Ballard, Andrew Cowie, Bernardino Romera-Paredes, Stanislav Nikolov, Rishub Jain, Demis Hassabis"
And further down: ” Contributions J.J. and D.H. led the research. J.J., R.E., A. Pritzel, M.F., O.R., R.B., A. Potapenko, S.A.A.K., B.R.-P., J.A., M.P., T. Berghammer and O.V. developed the neural network architecture and training. T.G., A.Ž., K.T., R.B., A.B., R.E., A.J.B., A.C., S.N., R.J., D.R., M.Z. and S.B. developed the data, analytics and inference systems. D.H., K.K., P.K., C.M. and E.C. managed the research.…
> J.J. and D.H. led the research
Hey, I wonder who these mysterious "J.J." and "D.H." might be?
Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
#64The AlphaFold paper has countless authors, many researchers and company resources underlying it. Hassabis’ contribution is management of resources and entrepreneurship, not the actual science. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists out there doing deep technical work, and they aren’t recognized. I think we might be the end of it, as the emphasis shifts to commercialization and product development. These AI dem…
The Nobel prize cannot go to a team so they have to pick individuals. This is true for many (most?) nobel prize awards. Consider for example the discovery of gravity waves - the team that built and operated LIGO was huge, but they have to pick. This has commonly been the case since the inception of the prizes - the professor gets the prize, the PhD students and postdocs don't usually. Not saying this is right, but it…
For gravitational waves discovery, Nobel prize went to the designers of the LIGO which was done long before we actually built it. The example that will fit more your idea would be Carlo Rubbia who got the award in 1984 for leading the CERN team who discovered the W and Z bosons. He did not have any contributions than leading the experiment that did it [1]. It is not like he designed or proposed the way we used to detect them. And the Nobel prize for higgs discovery went to theorists who proposed and predict it not the experimental physicists (thousands) who discovered it in 2012.
Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
#65Well more deserving than the author of Restricted Boltzmann machine.
Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
#66Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
#67Demis Hasabis has a really interesting and unusual CV for a nobel laureate [1], he started his career in AI game programming (he worked e.g. on Popoulous II, Syndicate, Theme Park for Bullfrog, and later for Lionhead Studios on Black & White) before doing a PhD in neuroscience, becoming an entrepreneur and starting DeepMind. I would say this is a refreshing and highly uncommon pick for a nobel prize, really cool to see that you don't have to be a university professor anymore to do this kind of impactful research.
Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
#68While I am skeptical about yesterdays award in physics, these are totally deserved and spot on. There are few approaches that will accelerate the field of drug development and chemistry as a whole in a way that the works of these three people will. Congratulations!
The physics prize should have went to Elon Musk!
Also I really hope the Nobel Prize of Economics goes to Bill Gates! He facilitated sooo much advances by releasing Excel that this must be recognized!
And based on this year's announcements so far I am not sure that my sarcastic comments should be taken as a joke!
Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
#69First Obama got the Peace Prize Nobel, now Demis Hassabis gets the Chemistry Nobel. I expect at a minimum the Nobel Prize in Literature to be Donald E. Knuth.
The Nobel Prize in Literature should go to Jeff Bezos for the Amazon Kindle, obviously!
Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
#70Demis Hasabis has a really interesting and unusual CV for a nobel laureate [1], he started his career in AI game programming (he worked e.g. on Popoulous II, Syndicate, Theme Park for Bullfrog, and later for Lionhead Studios on Black & White) before doing a PhD in neuroscience, becoming an entrepreneur and starting DeepMind. I would say this is a refreshing and highly uncommon pick for a nobel prize, really cool to s…
doesn't beat that patent clerk guy