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 father of Greek Cypriot origin 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.
Speaking to the Evening Standard back in 2014, Hassabis said he was born to “quite bohemian” parents and grew up in and around Finchley and Hendon in London.
He also spoke of his father, of Greek Cypriot descent saying “he did lots of different things”, including being a singer-songwriter.
“Neither of them are technical at all, which is quite bizarre,” he said.
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 award is the second this week given for work involving artificial intelligence, underscoring the growing importance of machine learning and large language models for science.
“One of the discoveries being recognised this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins,” the academy said in a statement. “The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences.”
“The potential of their discoveries is enormous,” the academy 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.
Later on Wednesday, the Democratic Alignment party (Dipa) extended its congratulations to Hassabis for the Nobel prize.
“The achievement earned by Hassabis, a leading figure in the fields of neuroscience and artificial intelligence, is a source of great pride for Cyprus, as it sees one of its own honoured at the highest levels of the global scientific community,” a statement released by the party said.
“We want to congratulate him for his continued efforts to elevate the country’s profile internationally and wish him continued success in his future endeavours.”
