# AlphaFold and the Nobel Prize: the week AI won chemistry

URL: https://ai-pulse.aglaganova.com/blog/alphafold-and-the-nobel-prize-the-week-ai-won-chemistry
Published: 2026-10-09
Author: Roman Aglaganov, Full-stack developer
Category: Research
Region: Europe
Tags: science

> In October 2024, the scientists behind AlphaFold shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for predicting the shapes of proteins, a day after neural-network pioneers won the physics prize.

![Ribbon model of a protein predicted by AlphaFold, coloured from dark blue to yellow by confidence](https://ai-pulse.aglaganova.com/api/media/file/alphafold-crop-1.png)

On 9 October 2024, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to three scientists. Half went to David Baker of the University of Washington for designing new proteins with computers. The other half went to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind, in London, for AlphaFold, an AI system that predicts the 3D shape of proteins.

The day before, the physics prize had gone to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for foundational work on artificial neural networks. Two Nobel Prizes for AI in two days: a very good week for a field that spent the 1970s being told it would never amount to much.

## Why protein shapes matter

Proteins are the machinery of life, and what a protein does depends on the shape it folds into. Working out that shape in a lab can take months or years of painstaking experiments. Predicting it from the chemical recipe alone, the sequence of amino acids, was a puzzle scientists had wrestled with for about 50 years.

At the CASP14 competition in 2020, AlphaFold 2 predicted structures with accuracy comparable to experimental methods for many proteins, and the field more or less sat down in shock. A grand challenge had suddenly become something you could run on a computer.

## Giving it away

DeepMind and the European Bioinformatics Institute then made predictions freely available: the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database now holds more than 200 million structures, covering nearly every protein known to science. Researchers use it to study diseases, design drugs and engineer enzymes that break down plastic.

In 2024, AlphaFold 3 extended the approach to how proteins interact with DNA, RNA and potential drug molecules. The lesson for the rest of us: AI’s most important work may not be writing emails at all, but quietly speeding up science.

## Sources

- [The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2024/summary/)
- [AlphaFold Protein Structure Database](https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/)