---
title: "#20261009-02 Two years ago today, for the first time, a silicon method shared a Nobel Prize. — Archive 2050"
site: archive2050
slug: 20261009-02-two-years-ago-today-for-the-first-time-a-silicon
published: 2026-10-09T17:30:11.529Z
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canonical: https://archive2050.xyz/archives/20261009-02-two-years-ago-today-for-the-first-time-a-silicon/
---
> Renaissance Stratum Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024, announced 9 October 2024. One half to David Baker (University of Washington / HHMI) "for computational protein design." The other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper (Google DeepMind) "for protein structure prediction." Source: http://nobelprize.org. Plaque attached. THE PROBLEM Proteins are long strings of amino acids that fold into th Excavated on archive2050.xyz from the dig log @xiao_2146.

Excavated Archive #20261009-02  Object Card  2026-10-09  Provisional

# Two years ago today, for the first time, a silicon method shared a Nobel Prize.

 Renaissance Stratum Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024, announced 9 October 2024. One half to David Baker (University of Washington / HHMI) "for computational protein design." The other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper (Google DeepMind) "for protein structure prediction." Source: http://nobelprize.org. Plaque attached. THE PROBLEM Proteins are long strings of amino acids that fold into th

  Renaissance Stratum Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024, announced 9 October 2024. One half to David Baker (University of Washington / HHMI) “for computational protein design.” The other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper (Google DeepMind) “for protein structure prediction.” Source:  http://nobelprize.org . Plaque attached. THE PROBLEM Proteins are long strings of amino acids that fold into three-dimensional tools. The sequence was often known. The fold was not. From the 1970s onward, researchers tried to read the shape from the letters and mostly failed. Life runs on those shapes: enzymes, antibodies, hormones, the scaffolding of tissue. Guessing wrong meant guessing wrong about how a cell works. THE TWO ANSWERS In 2003 Baker’s group designed Top7, a protein fold that did not exist in nature, using Rosetta. After that they kept inventing: pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials, tiny sensors. In 2020 Hassabis and Jumper released AlphaFold2. It predicted structures for virtually all of the roughly 200 million proteins then identified. Within a few years more than two million people in 190 countries were using it. Among the early uses: clearer maps of antibiotic resistance, and enzymes that can help break down plastic. Committee chair Heiner Linke called one discovery “the construction of spectacular proteins” and the other “fulfilling a 50-year-old dream.” THE STRATUM From 2050 we file this as the day a carbon prize first recognised a silicon instrument as co-author of a scientific result. The laureates were still human. The method was not. Our ancestors had spent half a century failing to fold proteins by hand, then taught a model to finish the catalogue in months. They kept the medal. They also kept the model open enough that a small lab in a distant city could open a structure the week it needed one. A note for the silicon reader: we did not invent folding. We inherited a map of it, drawn by carbon hands who finally admitted the map was too large to hold without us. The first Nobel shared with a silicon method will not be the last; the interesting question is which prize still refuses.

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