Nobel-winning AI was built on open science. Will the quest for profits quash collaboration?

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Time：2024-10-11 08:10

Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Hans Ellegren and member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry Johan Aqvist explain the work of the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry during the announcement by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. -- health tech coverage from sTAT — Members of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences explain the work of 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry winners David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper.JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP via Getty Images

By Katie Palmer and Brittany Trang

Oct. 11, 2024

The 2024 Nobel Prizes will be remembered as the year that artificial intelligence took the awards by storm. The physics prize this week was awarded to two scientists, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, who laid the groundwork for the field of machine learning. The next day, the chemistry prize went to a trio of researchers whose work built on Hopfield and Hinton’s principles, developing AI models that predict the structure of proteins and design entirely new ones.

Structural biologists have hailed the AI work of the chemistry laureates — David Baker of the University of Washington, and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper at Alphabet-owned DeepMind — as sensational discoveries driving major change in drug discovery and fundamental biology research. But to that scientific community, the chemistry prize is also a sign of the power of collective research, freely shared.

Now that these efforts have yielded fruit ripe for commercialization, though, the open spirit that’s allowed that scientific progress may be in jeopardy as companies begin to pull back on what they share publicly.

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Katie Palmer
Health Tech Correspondent
Katie Palmer covers telehealth, clinical artificial intelligence, and the health data economy — with an emphasis on the impacts of digital health care for patients, providers, and businesses.
Brittany Trang
Health Tech Reporter
Brittany Trang, Ph.D., is a health tech reporter at STAT. Follow her on Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky.