David Baker among Nobel laureates honored in Stockholm

During the award ceremony Dec. 10 at the Stockholm Concert Hall, UW Medicine biochemist David Baker stepped forward to receive his 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry from Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf. The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra heralded the moment with jubilant music. Watch the replay of the ceremony.

The award ceremony culminated a week of events and exhibits in Stockholm and Oslo, many of which were shared worldwide via livestream, radio and television. They honored the lives and contributions of Nobel laureates and fostered public appreciation of their fields of endeavor. 

Here is a pictorial look at Baker's participation in some traditions for newly minted Nobel honorees: 

The Nobel Prize Museum featured Nobel Creations, a new exhibition of six ceremonial dresses interpreting the 2024 Nobel Prizes. First-year students from the fashion program at Beckmans College of Design learned about the laureates' ideas and then demonstrated how fashion design can convey literary masterpieces, peacemaking efforts, economic studies, and scientific advances in chemistry, physiology or medicine, and physics. 

Physicist Marshall Baker and geophysicist Marcia Bourgin Baker accompanied their son and other relatives to Stockholm to attend his Nobel Week programs and award ceremony. They are both emeritus professors at the University of Washington in Seattle. 

Baker gave his Nobel Prize Acceptance Lecture in Chemistry on designing proteins from scratch to perform useful new functions. He described how this work evolved, and some practical applications of computationally designed proteins on the horizon. They include areas such as synthetic photosynthesis to transform sunlight into chemical energy, targeted cancer therapies, new vaccines, new ways to engineer semiconductors and other materials, and approaches to waylay the damaging fibrils inside the brain that accumulate long before Alzheimer's symptoms emerge. 

He recognized the foundational and continuing contributions of many scientists worldwide to the field of protein design, and the ideas, talents and achievements of his postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students and research staff.  Watch the lecture. 

A large contingency of colleagues -- former students and postdocs, scientific research collaborators, and many others -- traveled from far-flung places in the world to hear Baker give his Nobel Lecture in Chemistry and attend other events where he was speaking.

Several of his wife's family members sailed on a ferry from Finland to Stockholm to join Baker during the Nobel Week events and to attend the award ceremony. Among them were the Pyykkönen family who brought their eight-month-old son. The baby gives a congratulatory handshake to the new Nobel laureate in Chemistry in the photo above.

Note to news reporters and editors:  The photos and images used in this pictorial credited to Nobel Prize Outreach are available in the press room of the Nobel Prize website, nobelprize.org, for downloading and noncommercial use by the news media. Please see the Nobel web site for additional information on their image usage policies. Photos on this page by Ian Haydon may be used by the news media.

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