A trio of scientists shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for groundbreaking work that cracked the code of proteins, the chemical building blocks that make life possible.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A scientist born in Little Rock is one of three sharing the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Little Rock-born John Jumper now lives in London and is a director with the Google DeepMind artificial intelligence project as a computational biologist. His Nobel is for his work with proteins using artificial intelligence.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper who discovered powerful techniques to predict and even design novel proteins — the building blocks of life.