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The Nobel Prizes for 2024 in Chemistry

Last updated on October 10th, 2024 Posted on October 10, 2024 by NEXT IAS Current Affairs Team  502

Syllabus: GS3/Science

Context

  • The Nobel Prizes for 2024 in Chemistry was awarded to David Baker “for computational protein design” along with Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction”.

About

  • Proteins are large, complex molecules that play many critical roles in the body.
    • They are made up of smaller units called amino acids, which are linked together in long chains. 
    • There are 20 different types of amino acids, and the specific sequence in which they are arranged determines the protein’s structure and function.
  • In 2003, David Baker, a professor at the University of Washington, 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.
  • In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper developed an AI model called AlphaFold2, as part of Google’s DeepMind project, that was able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.
  • Significance: It allows us to better understand how life functions, including why some diseases develop, how antibiotic resistance occurs or why some microbes can decompose plastic.
About Nobel Prize

– Since 1901, the Nobel Prize has been awarded in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace, while a memorial prize in economic sciences was added in 1968.
a. In 1895 Alfred Nobel gave the largest share of his fortune to a series of the Nobel Prizes.
– From Stockholm, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences confers the prizes for physics, chemistry, and economics, the Karolinska Institute confers the prize for physiology or medicine, and the Swedish Academy confers the prize for literature. 
– The Norwegian Nobel Committee based in Oslo confers the prize for peace. 
– The Nobel Foundation is the legal owner and functional administrator of the funds and serves as the joint administrative body of the prize-awarding institutions, but it is not concerned with the prize deliberations or decisions, which rest exclusively with the four institutions.

Source: IE

 
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