Nobel prize win for Greek Cypriot scientist
A scientist of Greek Cypriot origin, Demis Hassabis, has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize for chemistry, along with other two other colleagues.
The trio won the award for having successfully used artificial intelligence to crack the code of almost all known proteins, known as the “chemical tools of life”.
Hassabis was born to a Greek Cypriot father and a Singaporean mother and grew up in north London.
He is a neuroscientist, video game designer, entrepreneur and world champion in chess and poker. He has been featured in prominent lists by Times, Forbes, and others, primarily for his work with artificial intelligence research laboratory DeepMind, now a subsidiary of Google.
He displayed exceptional skill in chess at an early age, reaching the highest levels for his age by the age of 13.
At 17, he contributed to the design of the popular video game Theme Park, which later inspired an entire genre of simulation and management games. He studied at the University of Cambridge and graduated in 1997 with double honours.
Before founding DeepMind, he earned a PhD in perceptual neuroscience, having published several academic papers related to artificial intelligence.
The Nobel committee lauded the trio, made of Hassabis, David Baker and John Jumper, for completing “the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins”, and Hassabis in particular for developing an AI model to predict proteins’ complex structures – a problem that had been unsolved for 50 years.
“The potential of their discoveries is enormous,” the committee said as the award was announced in Sweden on Wednesday. The prize, seen as the pinnacle of scientific achievement, carries a cash award of around €911.000