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John M. Jumper had a beautiful response to sharing this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry: “What I love about all this is that … we could draw a straight line from what we do to people being healthy.”
The Little Rock native, born in 1985, graduated from Pulaski Academy in 2003 and is the youngest chemistry laureate in more than 70 years. Jumper shared the award with David Baker of the University of Washington and Jumper’s colleague at Google’s DeepMind, Demis Hassabis.
Hassabis and Jumper created an artificial intelligence model called AlphaFold2 to predict the shape of proteins, the chemical tools of life. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel, called Hassabis and Jumper’s model a “stunning breakthrough” that “has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries. Among a myriad of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.”
In his statement on receiving the honor, Jumper focused on the practical use of the AI model: “It is a key demonstration that AI will make science faster and ultimately help to understand disease and develop therapeutics.”
The work of this Arkansas native has the potential to improve lives for generations.
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