Little Rock native, Pulaski Academy grad wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A scientist born in Little Rock is one of three sharing the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Little Rock-born John Jumper now lives in London and is a director with the Google DeepMind artificial intelligence project as a computational biologist. His Nobel is for his work with proteins using artificial intelligence.

According to the Nobel Committee , in 2020, Jumper worked with Demis Hassabis to develop an artificial intelligence model called AlphaFold2 . AlphaFold helped the pair predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins identified by researchers in 3D.

Before AlphaFold, predicting protein structure was a complex and time-consuming process, officials said.

Nobel officials said that since 2020, more than 2 million people in 190 countries have used AlphaFold2, which has helped them better understand proteins and their potential.

Nobel officials said Jumper, a 1985-born Pulaski Academy alumni, is the youngest chemistry laureate for over 70 years.

The Noble Committee named David Baker as the third awardee. Baker is using the building blocks of amino acids to create new kinds of proteins with broad applications.

The committee announced that by cracking the code for protein structures, which life can not exist without, the three advanced the science to the most significant benefit of humankind.

The committee quoted Jumper when he received his award notice that he loved his work.

“I’ve been a computational biologist a long time and I like to say in talks, we need this to work,” Jumper said. “You know, we need computation to solve the problems of biology. And I just love that it’s starting to work and I can’t believe we’re getting recognition this fast for it.”

John Jumper, 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awardee

Pulaski Academy officials were excited to announce that one of their alums received the prestigious award.

“John Jumper, a graduate of Pulaski Academy’s Class of 2003, has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences!” officials said in a blog post. “This prestigious honor recognizes John’s pivotal role in developing AlphaFold2, an AI-based system that has solved the decades-long challenge of predicting protein structures.”

According to Google DeepMind, the AlphaFold paper published in 2021 is one of the most-cited publications of all time.

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