Half the prize goes to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper from Google DeepMind for using AI to solve protein folding, and the other to David Baker for tools to help design new proteins.

British computer scientist Professor Demis Hassabis has won a share of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for "revolutionary" work on proteins, the building blocks of life. Prof Hassabis, 48, co-founded the artificial intelligence (AI) company that became Google DeepMind.

The other half was shared between John Jumper and Demis Hassabis from DeepMind, Google’s artificial-intelligence ( AI) company, for their development of AI models capable of predicting three-dimensional protein structure,

Demis Hassabis and John Jumper are honored for their work using AI to predict the structure of proteins. Just when they believed they were passed over for this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry, two scientists from Google's DeepMind AI research team got the call -- mere minutes before they were announced as honorees.

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their work with proteins.

On Wednesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Demis Hassabis and John Jumper are recipients of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Hassabis is the CEO of Google’s DeepMind AI unit, while Jumper is a director there.

The award this week of Nobel prizes in chemistry and physics to a small number of artificial intelligence pioneers affiliated with Google has stirred debate over the company's research dominance and how breakthroughs in computer science ought to be recognized.

For long periods of its history, artificial intelligence has lurked in the hinterland of science, often unloved and unfunded -- but two Nobel prizes in one week suggest its time