Google DeepMind Director and Nobel Laureate John Jumper

When John Jumper got the call earlier this month from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences that he was winning the Nobel Prize, he almost didn’t answer.

The director of Google DeepMind, the tech giant’s formidable AI lab, recognized the Swedish area code on his phone and froze, unable to believe what was on the precipice of happening. But on October 9, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, alongside DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, for their creation of AlphaFold, an AI model that predicts the structure of proteins, the building blocks of biology, based on their chemical sequence.

“I really didn't think it was going to happen,” Jumper told Forbes.

The two Google scientists split the award with David Baker, a professor at the University of Washington who used software to invent a new protein. Baker, who founded the university’s Institute of Protein Design in 2012, told Forbes earlier this year that he was shocked to see how much the field has grown in recent years. “It was always this kind of lunatic, fringe thing. Very much out of the mainstream,” he said.

For more than half a century, protein folding had been one of the most vexing and promising problems in modern science: predicting the shape and structure of proteins is key in understanding how they’ll interact with the external environment, paving the way for drug discoveries and the development of new materials. With AlphaFold, DeepMind was able to predict millions of folding patterns using generative AI — exponentially quicker and cheaper than it would take to traditionally perform those computations.

Jumper, who joined DeepMind in 2017, is the youngest Nobel laureate in Chemistry in over 70 years. He chatted with Forbes about winning the award, the AI landscape, and building AlphaFold.

Richard Nieva: First, congrats on the accomplishment. I heard in an interview you recorded right after the announcement that you thought you had a 10% chance of winning. And so, how did you find out you won, and what was going through your head?

John Jumper: So it's like a 10% chance of winning the lottery, right? The best chance anyone ever gets at the lottery. But still, I was very nervous, and still very much couldn't sleep the night before that. Well, I had tried to sleep through. My goal was to wake up and find out if I had won one way or another.

But anyway, I was sitting, waiting. I thought the call came about an hour beforehand. And so with about an hour from when the announcement was supposed to be, I just turned to my wife, and I said, “Well, I guess not this year.” And 30 seconds later, I get this Swedish area code pop up on my phone. And I'm not sure I remember it this way, but according to my wife, I just stared at it for a while, until she yelled at me to answer the phone. I really didn't think it was going to happen.

Nieva: How did you celebrate?

Jumper: I knew that the AlphaFold team was going to get together to watch the........

© Forbes