Nobel Prize winner has Tri-Cities connection. He often teams up with Richland scientists

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland was basking in reflected honor Wednesday after a Seattle scientist who has collaborated with scientists there was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Computational biologist David Baker, professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington School of Medicine and director of the UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design, was awarded the prize along with two other scientists for computational protein design.

He has collaborated with PNNL scientists on at least 15 research papers, some of the most recent ones still in the publishing pipeline.

Baker is a principal investigator for the Energy Frontier Research Center that PNNL codirects with the University of Washington , the Center for the Science of Synthesis Across Scales. He also is part of a program PNNL has with the Department of Energy Office of Science on biophysical science. Both leverage the capabilities he was recognized for Wednesday.

“We’re thrilled,” said Louis Terminello, associate laboratory director at PNNL.

“His work being recognized ... is really a very important step in how artificial intelligence and machine learning is being embraced by the scientific community to accelerate scientific discovery,” Terminello said.

‘New kinds of proteins’

Baker succeeded in what the Nobel Prize committee said in its announcement was “... the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins” that don’t exist in nature.

Proteins are the workhorses of biology, essential for countless cellular functions, according to UW Medicine.

Baker and his colleagues have for decades used computing power to learn how long chains of chemicals called amino acids fold into protein structures.

The resulting 3-D shapes of protein molecules determines how they function in living systems and is important for understanding biology and developing new types of vaccines and new medicines, including for treating cancer more safely and more effectively and tamping down autoimmune diseases.

Proteins also are being designed to neutralize pandemic viruses, Baker said at a press conference Wednesday.

There also may be environmental applications, such as new proteins to break down plastics and other pollutants and to enhance carbon fixation.

“I think protein design has huge potential to make the world a better place, and I really do think we are just at the very, very beginning,” Baker said.

PNNL research

In one of Baker’s earlier collaborations with PNNL in 2017, the Richland lab and the University of Washington School of Medicine assembled artificial proteins into arrays, filaments and honeycomb lattices on a crystal surface to demonstrate control over the way the proteins interact with surfaces to form complex structures previously seen only in natural protein systems.

“This is a milestone in the study of protein-material interfaces,” Baker, the co-senior author of the research, said then. “We achieved an unprecedented degree of order by designing units that self-assemble into aligned rows of nanorods, precise hexagonal latices and exquisite single-molecule-wide nanowires.”

The research set the stage for designing new biomolecules that assemble at scales from atomic to millimeter lengths, just as biology can organize matter from the atomic scale all the way up to large animals, PNNL explained at the time.

Recently, artificial intelligence has been tapped by Baker and others to predict protein structures with unprecedented accuracy and speed. This has greatly expanded scientists’ ability to model the building blocks of life.

Both the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Nobel Prize in Physics awarded Tuesday for pioneering artificial intelligence research signal how important artificial intelligence will be to accelerating scientific discovery, Terminello said.

“PNNL is readily embracing the use of artificial intelligence for nearly every one of its mission areas — everything ranging from national security to protecting the electric grid to discovering new proteins,” he said.

Artificial intelligence speeds research

As Baker has collaborated with at least a dozen PNNL scientists, PNNL plans to continue its connection with him and his capabilities as it embraces artificial intelligence more directly in its research, he said.

PNNL has about 1,000 staff who are using artificial intelligence or advancing the science of artificial intelligence and has a Center for AI that coordinates across different areas and looking for opportunities to accelerate scientific discovery in ways that can be trusted, he said.

PNNL scientists also have collaborated on research with Google DeepMind in London, which employs the other two Nobel Prize winners this year for chemistry, Demis Hassabis, the chief executive, and John Jumper, the director.

Work with DeepMind includes a 2019 study on speeding medical drug design using predictions of protein interactions with the assistance of machine learning.

Baker is also known for an online video puzzle game he collaborated on the development of called “ Foldit ” with colleagues at the UW Center for Game Science.

This game enables people with no background in science to help solve protein structure problems. More than 400,000 people have played the game, and Foldit players have been named as co-authors in some of Baker’s published work. These citizen scientists have contributed to research on a wide range of medical challenges including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and the Ebola virus.

2017 Nobel Prize

The Tri-Cities also has a close connection to the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics .

The award went to three physicists key to the development of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory at Hanford in Eastern Washington and its twin in Louisiana, after the LIGO observatories detected signals about one-thousandth the size of a proton to detect gravitational waves.

Their detection confirmed predictions Albert Einstein made 100 years earlier about the fabric of space and time, opening up a new way to study the universe.

The three scientists credited those who worked at the two LIGO observatories in the United States and the Virgo observatory in Italy.