A life in context
The person behind the prize
Hassabis worked in computer games, studied neuroscience and co-founded DeepMind. His career brings together questions about intelligence and the construction of systems that learn. At DeepMind he helped direct the effort to apply machine learning to predicting the shapes of proteins.
The contribution
Together with John Jumper and their team, he developed AlphaFold2, presented in 2020. It greatly improved predictions of protein structures from amino-acid sequences and made structural hypotheses available to researchers at a new scale.
The idea in plain language
Proteins are chains of amino acids that fold into intricate shapes. Those shapes help determine what the molecules do. Predicting a shape from its sequence had been a major challenge for decades.
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