The first Nobel laureate from Arkansas never meant to be a chemist.
John Jumper’s path to the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry began with an unexpected career change that merged artificial intelligence with the love of science he found growing up on 10 acres just outside of Little Rock.
“I lived in the same place the first 18 years of my life,” Jumper said during a video interview with Arkansas Business. “Horses, dogs, the whole menagerie, barn cat. It was a wonderful place to go around with so much nature.”
Jumper, a 2003 graduate of Pulaski Academy, is now the director of Google DeepMind, a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory based in London, but he started off as an involved Arkansas student.
During his time at Pulaski Academy, Jumper participated in the science and engineering club, chess club and Model United Nations, while also playing soccer.
As a senior, he wrote a thesis titled “A Model for Rogue States” in Bill Topich’s honors thesis class. Jumper said Topich had a great impact on his education. “Bill Topich was a really excellent kind of political science teacher, about how the world really works,” Jumper said.
Another great mentor? Mike Thomas, his soccer coach.
“In some ways, I think I learned more outside science,” Jumper said. “I really learned how to work hard toward something, how to think about questions where the answer wasn’t so certain. Learning how to learn and do something yourself.”
Pulaski Academy celebrated its internationally recognized alumnus after he was awarded the prize.
“We are incredibly proud of John and his remarkable journey since his time at Pulaski Academy,” Garry Sullivan, head of school at Pulaski Academy, said in a statement. “His curiosity and commitment to excellence, which were evident during his upper school years, have led to transformative achievements on a global scale. We are honored to count him as one of our own.”
After graduating, Jumper studied mathematics and physics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, before earning a master’s in theoretical condensed matter physics at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
Jumper’s career started in physics, and he said he still considers himself a physicist. So his path to chemistry was unexpected.
After receiving a Marshall Scholarship, one of the most prestigious forms of funding for students in the United Kingdom, to study physics, Jumper found he didn’t “love” the area of physics he was in. So he dropped out of his Ph.D. program and went to “go get a job.”
He ended up working at a place where he simulated protein movements with computers, the beginning of his work with proteins. “I worked there for three years and absolutely loved it,” Jumper said. But then he decided it was time to go back to graduate school.
His wife, who was also pursuing a Ph.D. at the time, received a “great” offer to the University of Chicago, but while applying, Jumper had missed the deadline for Chicago’s physics program.
“I’m not going to live apart from my wife for years,” Jumper said. “And I’m telling this to a friend at work, and he goes, ‘Well, do you think you could be a chemist? I know this professor in chemistry at Chicago.’ I hadn’t taken a chemistry class since high school, but I said, ‘Sure, I can be a chemist.’ And that’s how I ended up a chemist.”
Jumper went on to get his master’s and his doctorate in theoretical chemistry, both from the University of Chicago.
AlphaFold
Jumper won the Nobel prize for his work on AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence system developed by Google DeepMind that predicts a protein’s three-dimensional structure from its amino acid sequence. It achieves accuracy that is competitive with experiments, but much quicker.
AlphaFold solved what the Nobel Foundation called a “50-year-old challenge in science.” The program can predict the structure of proteins in minutes — a process that previously took scientists years, if they found success at all.
The system has predicted the structures of nearly all 200 million known proteins and is being used by more than 2 million researchers across 190 countries.
Jumper shares half of the prize with Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, for the development of AlphaFold. The other half was awarded to David Baker of the University of Washington for computational protein design.
The development of AlphaFold took approximately eight years, with the most productive period occurring between 2018 and 2020.
“It’s not how people imagine science, where you sit around and someone has an idea and you say, ‘Eureka! It’s done!’” Jumper said. “It’s very iterative.”
AlphaFold was announced in 2020, which is the work that won the Nobel Prize, but more has been done in the four years since. Jumper has researched how and why proteins stick together as well as how they stick to DNA.
He said the main goal is to push the research outward and apply it to more general applications.
“How many more problems can we solve with related ideas?” Jumper said. Applications of the technology span from drug development to agriculture. Proteins are in everything, Jumper said, even in something as simple as laundry detergent.
“There’s been some really interesting applications in agriculture, understanding plant pathogens, plant diseases,” Jumper said. “Because getting a protein structure is so hard, it was actually much less done for plants, which have a lot more proteins than humans.”
The impact on drug development could also be substantial. Drugs turn specific proteins “on or off,” by sticking to them. So knowing the structure of a protein could make drugs more effective.
“This will almost certainly make us more efficient at [making] drugs,” Jumper said. “Drug development typically takes 10 or 15 years for a single drug. The cost per drug is more than a billion [dollars] when you include all the failures. This will help us make that a lot faster.”
Jumper also said there’s potential that when he’s older, he will be taking medicines “based on insights from using our research.”
Winning the Prize
Jumper learned about winning the prize through a phone call.
“They didn’t have my phone number,” Jumper said. “They were calling around trying to find someone with our phone numbers.”
Born in 1985, Jumper is the youngest chemistry laureate in 70 years, a fact Jumper says shows how much faster science is moving today.
“I have more of my research career ahead of me than behind me,” Jumper said. “I want to find the next thing that people don’t think we can solve and then go after it. There’s such an enormous opportunity to use AI to help scientists.”
Jumper is also Arkansas’ first Nobel winner. And though he lives in London now, he’s still proud of his roots.
“I still very much think of myself as an Arkansan and a Southerner,” Jumper said. “It’s really meaningful to me, because we’re not exactly a state known for science, and it’s just really great to see that we can do these things.”
Jumper said he hopes two things come from him winning the prize. The first is that people see there is “potential to do work that matters in science with AI.” The second is that he inspires people in Arkansas to pursue science.
“We can do great things. There are wonderful problems to be involved with in science and elsewhere,” Jumper said. “It’s wonderful to go after those things, and it’s a lot of fun.”
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