2024 Nobel Prize winners announced

It’s that time of year again — the first of the 2024 Nobel Prizes have been announced.

Physiology or Medicine

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has decided to award the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, for their discovery of microRNA — a class of tiny RNA molecules that plays a crucial role in gene regulation.

Ambros and Ruvkun were interested in genes that control the timing of activation of different genetic programs, ensuring that various cell types develop at the right time. In 1993, they discovered a new principle of gene regulation, mediated by a previously unknown type of RNA, in the C. elegans roundworm. This unusual mechanism was assumed by other scientists to be irrelevant to humans and other more complex animals, but that perception changed in 2000 when Ruvkun’s research group published their discovery of another microRNA that was present throughout the animal kingdom. Today we know that there are more than 1000 genes for different microRNAs in humans, and that gene regulation by microRNA is universal among multicellular organisms.

Physics

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics to John J Hopfield and Geoffrey E Hinton, for foundational discoveries and inventions that have enabled machine learning with artificial neural networks. Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, while Hinton invented a method that can autonomously find certain properties in data.

Hopfield invented a network that uses a method for saving and recreating patterns, utilising physics that describes a material’s characteristics due to its atomic spin. The network is trained by finding values for the connections between the nodes so that the saved images have low energy. When the network is fed a distorted or incomplete image, it methodically works through the nodes and updates their values so the network’s energy falls.

Hinton used the Hopfield network as the foundation for a new network that uses a different method — the Boltzmann machine — which can learn to recognise characteristic elements in a given type of data. The machine is trained by feeding it examples that are very likely to arise when the machine is run. It can be used to classify images or create new examples of the type of pattern on which it was trained, with Hinton’s work helping to initiate the current explosive development of machine learning.

Chemistry

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John M Jumper, for their work on protein structure prediction. Baker has succeeded in building entirely new kinds of proteins, while Hassabis and Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures.

Proteins generally consist of 20 different amino acids, which can be described as life’s building blocks. In 2003, 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.

Since the 1970s, researchers had tried to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences, but this proved difficult. But in 2020, Hassabis and Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2, which enabled them to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified. Among a myriad of scientific applications, AlphaFold2 has enabled researchers to better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Han Kang for her intense poetic prose, while the Nobel Prizes in Peace and Economic Sciences will be announced soon. As is tradition, the Nobel Prize award ceremony will take place at the Stockholm Concert Hall, Sweden, on 10 December — the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.

Image caption: The 2023 Nobel Prize award ceremony. Image ©Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Nanaka Adachi.