David Baker · Science & Medicine
Biochemist who created the Rosetta software and designed Top7, the first protein with a structure unknown in nature; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 for computational protein design
6 October 1962, Seattle, Washington, United States
Seattle · Cambridge, Massachusetts · Berkeley · San Francisco
David Baker is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Biochemist who created the Rosetta software and designed Top7, the first protein with a structure unknown in nature; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 for computational protein design
Origins and early life
David Baker was born in Seattle on 6 October 1962, the son of the physicist Marshall Baker and the atmospheric geophysicist Marcia Bourgin Baker, both on the faculty of the University of Washington. The English Wikipedia, citing the jinfo.org list of Jewish Nobel laureates, and the Jewish Virtual Library state that he was born into a Jewish family; this directory has found no statement of his own. At Harvard he began in philosophy and social studies, turned to biology, graduated in 1984, and took his doctorate in biochemistry at Berkeley in 1989, in Randy Schekman's laboratory.
Work and career
After postdoctoral work with David Agard in San Francisco, he joined the University of Washington in 1993, studied how proteins fold, and at the end of the decade began writing Rosetta, software that predicts a protein's structure. Rosetta did well in the CASP contest in 1998, and his team then ran it in reverse: in 2003 they published Top7, a protein of 93 amino acids with a structure found nowhere in nature, designed from scratch on a computer.
He released the code of Rosetta, enlisted volunteers through Rosetta@home and the game Foldit, and in 2012 founded the university's Institute for Protein Design, adding artificial intelligence to Rosetta after 2020. Proteins from his laboratory have neutralised viruses and served as catalysts, and a vaccine designed at the institute by Neil King became, in his words, the first de novo designed medicine approved for humans.
Recognition
He was awarded half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for computational protein design, the other half going jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind for protein structure prediction. Author of more than 640 papers and a co-founder of 21 biotechnology companies, he is married to the biochemist Hannele Ruohola-Baker, and they have a daughter, Amanda, and a son, Benjamin.
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Source: Wikipedia — David Baker
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Biochemist who created the Rosetta software and designed Top7, the first protein with a structure unknown in nature; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 for computational protein design
Source: Wikipedia — David Baker
