Nobel Prize winner in chemistry David Baker was woken up in the USA by the famous call from Stockholm. The professor, who teaches in Seattle, Washington, said he was asleep when the phone rang when he was connected to the award announcement at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
After he picked up the phone and heard the news of his award, his wife started screaming for joy so loudly that he couldn’t hear the caller very well. “It was very, very exciting. It’s turning out to be a pretty unique, special day,” Baker said.
“Award for the entire scientific field”
Florian Praetorius, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) in Klosterneuburg (Lower Austria), described the awarding of the prize to Baker as “terrific” and also “an award for the entire scientific field.” He conducted postdoctoral research in David Baker’s lab at the University of Washington from 2018 until earlier this year. “It was an environment that I have never seen before – just the number of outstanding scientists working there in one place, and Baker himself, who is at the top and holds this large group of around 100 researchers together and more brings us to work together,” he told the APA.
Despite the size of the group, there was a surprising amount of contact with Baker, “that’s probably one of his greatest talents is that he manages to stay in touch with so many people. It’s his favorite thing to talk to people, to everyone “To communicate with individuals as often as possible,” says Praetorius.
As a scientist, Baker is characterized by “creativity and absolute openness, as well as the complete absence of pride and stubbornness.” It often happened that something was done differently than he originally suggested, and as soon as it worked, he was very enthusiastic – “he doesn’t insist on things.”
DeepMind’s approach was “better”.
Praetorius cited the tools for predicting protein structure, for which Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind received the other half of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, as a “fine example of Baker’s lack of pride.” The US researcher also worked on these prediction methods himself, but ultimately DeepMind’s approach was better. “It was a shock in Baker’s laboratory at the time when AlphaFold was so good, but Baker’s reaction was also overwhelming, as he immediately said: That’s great, that works better, we’ll use that.”
Praetorius also works on biomolecular design with proteins at ISTA. “Proteins are the building blocks on which life is based – having control over them and generating new functions has countless possible applications,” said the scientist, referring to Baker’s laboratory, from which 20 to 30 start-ups have already emerged. They are mostly working on therapeutic applications, and vaccines are also a very big topic. “With design you have more control and can respond to things more quickly and in a more targeted manner. None of this is on the market yet, but it is a matter of time and will come sooner or later,” Praetorius is convinced.
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