AlphaFold: Grand Challenge to Nobel Prize with John Jumper

**John Jumper** (0:08)
I think we'll get this ability to poke the cell in exciting ways, to interrogate it. Every time we develop that, we'll develop a more interventional understanding of the cell that we will bring forward to medicine and synthetic biology.

**Hannah Fry** (0:22)
Welcome to Google DeepMind the podcast. I'm Professor Hannah Fry. Now today, we are talking about AlphaFold, one of the most extraordinary technological breakthroughs in modern science, a tool that has been described as the most useful thing that AI has ever done. And in truth, that might be an understatement. This is a Google DeepMind AI system that solved one of biology's grandest challenges, predicting the 3D structures of proteins, the fundamental building blocks of life. Its latest version, AlphaFold 3, can now model the structure and interactions of all of life's molecules with unprecedented accuracy. And the impact has been seismic. AlphaFold has mapped hundreds of millions of protein structures, and more than 3 million researchers across 190 countries now use its database. It is transforming drug discovery. And in 2024, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Google DeepMind's Demis Asalvis and John Jumper, who is our guest on today's podcast. Now, this is a story that we have been following on this podcast since season one, which is nearly eight years ago, long before it hit the headlines. So if you are coming to AlphaFold for the first time and wondering what all the fuss is about, you can find our previous explainer episodes linked in the description.
Welcome to the podcast, John.

**John Jumper** (1:45)
It's exciting.

**Hannah Fry** (1:45)
I don't think I've interviewed you since you've won your Nobel Prize. Tell, where were you when you found out about it?

**John Jumper** (1:50)
I stayed home because I was nervous enough. I thought there was a chance, like one in ten a chance.

**Hannah Fry** (1:55)
Yeah.

**John Jumper** (1:55)
And so I figured I would be disappointed at home. And I was kind of just sitting in the bed. My original plan was I'll sleep through it and a phone call wakes me up, then I've got the Nobel, but I couldn't sleep.

**Hannah Fry** (2:07)
Because you knew the day that the f***ing what happened, right?

**John Jumper** (2:09)
You know the day. I knew, in fact, the kind of time that it was scheduled to be announced at 11 I knew that winners were called about an hour beforehand. So by about 10.30, I said, oh, well, I guess not this year. And I told my wife, and she goes, no, no, wait. And as like as she's telling me to wait, my phone lights up with a phone call from Sweden. And thankfully, it was not the world's meanest prank call. And yeah, it was just kind of this extraordinary thing. And you answer and they say, is Dr. John Jumper available? Yes, I have some wonderful news. Great. Can you please hold? Right, so they get, I think, Hans Olligrave.

**Hannah Fry** (2:47)
But they make you hold.

**John Jumper** (2:48)
Well, I think they were trying to read. Part of the problem was they didn't have either Demis or my phone number initially. So anyway, they ended up calling us very late, but then they were finally arranging and they pulled the person on and he says, you know, I have some life-changing news. And they don't say the word Nobel for like 60, 90 seconds, which was the longest minute of my life, as there is no other explanation for this call. And I remember the very first thing I did is run to get a shower, because I knew I was going to get no time for the rest of the day. But after that, you know, it was announced, you come in, you see the team, you have this amazing kind of celebration. We bought the local Waitrose out of sparkling wine.

**Hannah Fry** (3:26)
Only the best will do.

**John Jumper** (3:28)
It was, it was, I'm not a connoisseur. And we were celebrating with friends. And there was just this incredible kind of party just across the floors of our building. It was amazing.

**Hannah Fry** (3:39)
The thing is, it's an extraordinary story of you as an individual, right? Because your first Ph.D., your physics Ph.D., you dropped out, right? Yeah, yeah. And so going from that, which I think must have been quite a hard experience to live through, to like being a Nobel Prize winner and having your tool being used in tens of thousands of academic papers.

**John Jumper** (4:01)
I mean, I will say dropping out was a very lucky thing for me. I was doing the wrong thing. I didn't really want to. And so I just left. And because I left, I actually fell into this computational biology group that was doing amazing work on custom computer chips to simulate proteins. And then I go back and I do my PhD now in chemistry by another set of accidents. And I didn't have those great computers. So why not get into AI? Why not try and use sophisticated algorithms to make up for a lack of computer? I have to be the first person to get into AI because of a lack of computational capability rather than an abundance.