Nobel Prize Conversations

“If you imagine each researcher as a kind of a neuron in the communal brain, then people call me a connection machine.”

David Baker is a true believer in collaboration. He sees mentoring as one of the most essential parts of his job. Baker spends most of his time at his laboratory and his colleagues explain his role as a connection machine as he connects “people who are working on things that are related”. He believes that progress in science is made by working together and sharing ideas.

Despite being in high demand since receiving his Nobel Prize, Baker has turned down all work trips to focus on being present in his laboratory and exploring new frontiers in science. The only work trip he has made since the prize announcement in October 2024 is the journey to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize. And for that, he brought 200 former students to Sweden celebrate the award with him.

This conversation was published on 29 May, 2025. Podcast host Adam Smith is joined by Karin Svensson.

Below you find a transcript of the podcast interview. The transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors.

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David Baker: It’s nice to have a relaxed conversation like this because normally I might have 10 half an hour meetings with students a day, then it will be a research presentation and then I often just have sort of ideas or someone has an idea about something we should brainstorm.

Adam Smith: It really was an enormous pleasure to pin David Baker down for, as he says, this relaxed conversation. Because even amongst that most focused group of people, the Nobel Prize laureates, he is particularly focused. But the interesting thing is that he’s anything but that vision that we have of the kind of elusive genius, the lone scientist, as he implied it in what he just said. He is a great collector and connector of people. His lab featuring people from all over the world is a hive of activity and absolutely enormous. That collaborative enterprise that forms the core of his science comes up really strongly in this conversation. Enjoy with me this rare timeout in David Baker’s life.

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Karin Svensson: This is Nobel Prize Conversations, and our guest is David Baker, recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was awarded for computational protein design. He shared the prize with John Jumper and Demis Hassabis. Your host is Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach. This podcast was produced in cooperation with Fundación Ramon Areces. David Baker is the Henrietta and Aubrey Davis endowed professor in biochemistry at the University of Washington. He speaks to Adam about bringing 200 people to the party in Stockholm, what he’s learned from his broken ski poles and trailblazing in the field of protein design. But first Adam wants to know what it is about David Baker that enables him to ask audacious questions.

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Smith: I wanted to start by just asking you what it is about you that enables you to ask such big questions?

Baker: I have always been interested in exploring new things and discovering new things, and I guess I tend to get bored pretty easily. I really like being on the frontier and protein design has been and continues to be extremely exciting because of all the really amazing new opportunities that are opening up.

Smith: But I would say that yes, certainly you’re on the frontiers, but you are almost ahead of the frontier throughout your career. You’ve been so far ahead of the game and that requires a special sort of confidence, some kind of special intellectual bravery I would’ve said, but maybe it doesn’t strike you like that.

Baker: I think one thing that is very important is I’m convinced that groups of people working together and collaborating closely, if they’re all really good and really motivated, can do amazing things and have the kind of confidence in solving new problems that comes about. I’ve worked really hard to develop what I call a communal brain in my lab and at the Institute for Protein Design, where we have really brilliant people coming from all over the world, working closely together. If you came here to walk through, you would just see people talking to each other all the time and brainstorming new ideas. That I think really gives the brain power and the confidence and the ability to continually break new ground and explore completely new areas.

Smith: What’s the secret to getting people to collaborate in that lovely way?

Baker: There are a couple things. One is when new people want to join the group, whether graduate students or others, we’re trying to look for people who would really thrive in this kind of environment and share ideas, discuss and brainstorm. Within the context of the group, we have lots of free food. There’s different food events, food and drink events every day. We have research talks several times a week. I really try and make an emphasis on everybody knowing what everyone is doing, even though it’s a fairly large research group. I basically don’t travel. I’m here all the time, so I spend all my time meeting with people one-on-one in a small group. I try to know what everyone’s doing and I connect people who are working on things that are related or where they might benefit from each other. There’s just really high density communication. If you imagine each researcher as a kind of a neuron in the communal brain, then people call me a connection machine or there’s just a lot of social engineering to make sure people are talking all the time.

Smith: Sounds great. That’s a rare self-discipline you have not traveling. It’s so easy to get caught in that mill of being elsewhere all the time.

Baker: Yes. I think I probably have set a record for Nobel Prize winners. I’ve been on exactly one trip outside of Seattle for work since the announcement in October, and that was to Stockholm.

Smith: I’m sure that is a record that’s extraordinary. How do you say no to everybody?

Baker: I think it comes back to what you said earlier. I do feel like we’re exploring uncharted territory and the unknown and the place where I’ll be able to learn the most about that exploration and achieve most is just right here. It’s going to other places in the world is not going to really help in charting the unknown because I think to some extent we are ahead and that’s really what I’m passionate about. Mentoring is a really important part of my job because the scientific advances are one thing, but really I think the bigger impact is on all the amazing scientists who are coming here to get trained and then going off and doing wonderful things. In Stockholm it was just incredible. There were almost 200 former students in postdocs, I think about 60 of whom now have faculty positions all over the world who came interacting with that group. It was very clear to me that the impact I’m having is really in the people being trained then in the particular scientific advances. If I go away for a few days, then I’m missing. I might have 10 one-on-one meetings with students and then a bunch of informal discussions a day. So I’m really missing out a lot on both exploring the new frontier and mentoring.

Smith: Yes, it must be miserable if you’re sick for a few days. That number of your former and present students who came to Stockholm to help you celebrate, that must be another record, I would’ve thought.

Baker: I think so. I think that the Nobel Foundation didn’t want to state any numbers, but they were quite surprised how many people there were.

Smith: Yes. It must have been amazing. Quite a party I can imagine.

Baker: It was! There were a couple things. One of them was in the same time the banquet was going on, there was a party in the Grand Hotel, the room in which the Nobel Prize ceremony used to be. Then after the banquet was over, we all went there and it was just great. We also had a really nice dinner the night before in a beautiful museum in Stockholm. It was very special.

Smith: That really is the kind of the actualisation of the idea that it’s a team celebration. Lovely.

Baker: Yes. I really feel that the prize was for the group, the work of a really wonderful group of people, and the prize is really as much everybody’s as mine. It was really great to be able to celebrate with so many people.

Smith: This ability to refuse trips away and to stay in the lab, we often talk about the extraordinary focus that great scientists Nobel Prize laureates have, where they can stick with a problem for 10 years and don’t get diverted from it. They carry on doing it 10 or 20 years. This is another sort of focus, the ability not to get distracted is something very particular. I’m gathering that you perhaps don’t do too much self-analysis, but it’d be interesting to know how you became so focused. Were you always like that as a child? Were you very good at concentrating?

Baker: I think it’s now more than ever. I think that protein design is getting a lot of press these days, so people are hearing about it. I do give a lot of zoom talk, so several times a week I’ll be in a different country before I come to work, giving a talk. I am communicating what we’re doing, which is an important part of being a scientist. I just don’t spend time in on airplanes, hotels and all the other things that go with traveling. I think to some extent it does tie back to other things you mentioned. In my case, it’s not so much that I’m focused on a particular discovery, but I am very focused on exploring the new frontiers opened up by protein design. I just think that the best way to do that is to be here all the time.

Smith: Collaboration, open science sharing, obviously all very important to you. Where did you learn that? Because a lot of young scientists find it difficult to navigate the boundaries between what they should tell people, what they should share. When you were starting out, was it obvious to you that sharing was the best answer?

Baker: I think I’ve always been that way, and we had to formalise it at the time when the first scientists were leaving my research group back near the beginning when we had developed the Rosetta protein design and structure prediction software, and we had to decide what to do. We decided at that time, this was around the year 2000, that we would set it up so that everybody who left my group would continue to develop the software. We were licensing it to companies, and none of that money would go back to anyone’s pocket or to any particular institution. Instead, it would go into a nonprofit consortium we called the Rosetta Commons. That money would be used to support the broader development. That worked out really wonderfully. We’ve had amazing meetings ever since then, and the number of developers news. I think there’s over 120 different research groups involved now. I think in science, you have so much more impact if you share what you do, invite other people in and encourage people who are experts in the area to join or stay in. In the case of people leaving my group, I think it’s just very obvious to me that that’s the right thing to do. Also, in terms of the impact it’s had, with a communal brain, one that’s spread over many research groups, it becomes even more powerful.

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Svensson: So Adam, this all sounds a little bit like science fiction to me. How would you explain what protein design is?

Smith: I think, until recently, it was science fiction. Protein design is building new proteins from scratch. It’s envisaging a protein structure you want to make, and then working out what sequence of amino acids you need to put together in order to make that structure.

Svensson: That sounds amazing because I always think of proteins and amino acids as something that’s in nature, not something you can make.

Smith: Exactly. Until very recently, that was the case. Nature’s been doing this for a long time. It was only in 1972 that Christian Anfinsen was given the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for working out that the structure of a protein is entirely dictated by the sequence of amino acids that form that protein. Now it seems obvious to us that that’s the case that proteins work in the way that individual proteins work because of the shape they are. But that wasn’t known until then. The next problem was working out how that happens. How does this chain of amino acids give a particular shape?

Svensson: Have we managed to find that out?

Smith: Yes and no. The answer is yes, broadly a big part of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the fact that we have worked it out, but it’s us in collaboration with machine learning that’s worked it out. For a long time it was thought that really we would be able to understand how proteins fold, because we’d understand the rules that govern the way that amino acids interact with each other to make a particular shape. That’s not quite how it turned out. In fact, those rules are still opaque, but it was pattern recognition that solved the problem, that by feeding millions and millions of structures into machine learning algorithms, they were able to see the patterns and predict how this particular sequence of amino acids would fold up to form this shape.

Svensson: So yet another example of us being outsmarted by machines then.

Smith: I suppose. As I say, people thought they might be able to understand this and they haven’t been able to, and the machines haven’t also understood it. They can just see the pattern. I think it’s probably nicer to say that it’s us working together with the machines that it was all those wonderful scientists who got those structures in the first place and filled up the protein data bank with millions of structures, fed those into the machines, and the machines have been able to see the patterns. It’s a nice example of humans and machines working together to solve a problem that has been around for a long time.

Svensson: Peaceful coexistence.

Smith: Yes. Actually that’s an important point. There’s all this talk of the worries of AI even in this podcast series, but in this case, this is working nicely.

Svensson: How does David Baker fit into this then? What was his contribution in the field that earned him earn a Nobel Prize?

Smith: He became interested in this protein folding problem very early, but he also saw it in the reverse direction. He understood that if you designed brand new proteins that nature had not made, you could perhaps work out how to make them by knowing what amino acid sequences would go into making up that shape. He was an early adopter of this idea that you could potentially make the proteins you wanted to make that nature had forgotten about, if you like. He developed algorithms to begin to predict structure from amino acid sequences. By a lovely combination of working with the algorithms and doing the biochemistry to test his ideas, he was able to move ahead very fast in this field of designing proteins. So he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in that field and building all sorts of amazing new proteins that the world had never seen before.

Svensson: The way you talk about this science, it feels like this big world opening up of new avenues to explore in terms of constructing these proteins. What are those frontiers that he’s been discovering?

Smith: That’s absolutely the point that the frontiers are so broad because proteins do so many different jobs. They’re responsible for pretty much everything that goes on inside us, and they’re also doing lots of jobs out there in nature. Anything that a protein can do can potentially, I suppose, be improved on or modified by building a new protein. There’s just no end to the possibilities, whether it’s for medical use in the body or for use out there in the environment, building new proteins to help us get rid of nasty substances or going into the new realms of nanotechnology or nano machines and thinking about how proteins and small molecules can interact. This must be why you hear in David Baker’s voice this absolute excitement and captivation with this field because it just opens up your word frontiers. What could be more exciting than that? Let’s hear David Baker himself talk about some of the possibilities that he is most excited about.

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Baker: There are many. I think there are some problems that I think we’ve pretty much already solved. The problem of designing proteins with new structures or new types of viral, like capsids for delivery, the design of proteins to bind to other proteins. This was a completely unsolved problem only a few years ago. Now we can do it quite robustly given a therapeutic protein target. We design a binder to it. We’ve also very recently made progress on designing catalysts proteins that can, for example, break chemical bonds or make chemical bonds. Some of the most exciting challenges ahead involve combinations of those modalities. For example, design a proteins that will not only bind to a target, but modify it, for example, destroy it for a more catalytic therapeutic. The design of machines in nature there are many different types of machines that, for example, power movement in our muscle. Now, we should be able to just combine catalysis and binding to make a whole variety of new nano machines that are intended for use, both in the body first (perhaps do quality control and circulation to help with things like chronic disease and aging) as well as for nanotechnology, finally fulfilling the vision of nano machines that can do things. Then I’m very fascinated by things that occur in nature like biomineralisation, like tooth and bone and shells, that’s proteins interacting with inorganic compounds. Now we’re trying to design proteins to template mineralisation not only of the minerals that nature’s use, but other more exotic compounds like semiconductors such as zinc oxide. I think there’s a whole new range of materials to be made there, and that’s just a small subset of the things that we’re working on now. I actually think the next five or 10 years are gonna be the most exciting of my career now that the basic protein design infrastructure works. There are so many really exciting areas that truly do sound like science fiction, but I think will become reality in the near future.

Smith: Yeah, it’s a bewilderingly large array of possibilities that your mind must be swimming in all directions all the time.

Baker: It’s really inspired by nature and evolution. If you look throughout life, there’s just so many different problems that nature has solved, and those solutions have all come about through random mutation and selection. There’s been no guiding intent. It’s just all kind of happened to happen. Yet we have all the amazing things in nature. Now if you think, well, we can actually design anything we want, the possibilities go far beyond what we have in nature, but the breadth of nature already provides inspiration for so many different things. Like, say, improve photosynthetic systems that can use solar energy much more efficiently or to a much wider range of things.

Smith: Is the technology moving so fast that there is a need for some kind of care regulation? Is it a bit like the biotech revolution where the biotech community itself held the SIMB conferences and thought we need to just keep a check on ourselves?

Baker: Right. We had a workshop last year at the IPD with government and nonprofit think tanks and all the scientists working on protein design to discuss this. What we concluded is that new methods should be kind of vetted by a committee to evaluate them, but the point of regulation should be at the level of DNA synthesis. Whenever you have a design protein, you can design something on the computer, but it doesn’t become reality until you create a synthetic piece of DNAA synthetic gene to encode it. We all collectively felt that that was the correct place to try and track and we decided probably the best way to do this would be to log all new DNA synthesis. If there is a problem later on, it can be tracked. I think overall, the other feeling is that nature has already kind of perfected ways of causing death and destruction on a really large scale, like the 1918 Spanish flu, for example. Nature already has made plenty of bad things, and the protein design has the potential to very rapidly respond to new threats, new pandemics, and perhaps even new biological manmade things. The conclusion was that the power of protein design to make the world better place far outweighed the downside, particularly since nature’s already mastered the downside, but that it would be prudent to log DNA synthesis. If there are problems, they can be traced.

Smith: Sounds very sensible and nicely put, but it isn’t always the case that the society necessarily views things the same way as the scientific community. Do you think that there is a potential of people to think there’s too much dabbling with nature as, for instance, they do when it comes to GMO foods in many cases. Is there a job to be done talking to society about what is happening and this extraordinarily rapid progress?

Baker: That’s a good point. I thought about writing a book from time to time, but that again is a little bit of a distraction from what I’m really want to do. That’s part of the reason to communicate the work and the excitement. I think there is a particular feeling about food, but in terms of medicines, people are quite accustomed to the idea that medicines will be new compounds. Almost all medicines, whether they’re small molecules or protein therapeutics are new in some way. I think there’s less objection there. I think people care naturally about efficacy and safety outside of medicine. If we’re working on enzymes to grade plastic, for example, I don’t think anyone will complain about such an enzyme being unleashed in the huge plastic piles in the ocean. I think once we have really good design protein solutions for current problems, I don’t anticipate there’ll be huge objection to deploying them.

Smith: I do want to explore you a bit, if you don’t mind, where you came from, so to speak. Your parents were physicists and you obviously didn’t go down that track, but you were a very bright student. What did you think you were gonna be when you were growing up?

Baker: I really didn’t know. When I started college, my major was initially social studies, and then I thought I would become a philosophy major. But I had sort of been interested in science actually in college. I had all these friends who knew exactly what they were going to do, and I had no idea what I was going to do. I think I took pretty much every intro class there was, which was not a good way to use the time. Then my last year I took a developmental biology class, and what came across there was how fast discoveries were being made and really the excitement and that kind of inspired me to apply to graduate school despite never having done research in a lab. Then I took a year off and kind of traveled around the world working on and off, and then started grad school the next year. I thought I wanted to work on developmental biology or how the brain works, but then I discovered that involved cutting up animals, which I didn’t really want to do, and also seemed very slow. So I got excited about working on how biological self-organisation comes about on the cellular scale. I did my PhD work with Randy Schekman, sort of understanding how cells get organised. I found during that time that I really enjoyed doing research and I enjoyed working with other people.

Smith: Just before you go on, I was with Randy in the autumn and he told a lovely story about you. He said that one time you wanted to tell him your results and you beckoned him over to your lab bench and you said, ‘Sit down there, I’m going to tell you about my results, and I’m going to explain it in a way that’s simple enough that even you can understand’.

Baker: Yes, that sounds like something I would’ve said. If graduate students said that to me today, I would be delighted. Things like that do happen. It all comes around. Randy did show me how to build a research group which was incredibly collaborative and sort of directed towards a common goal. I thought after that I would sort of ultimately come back to that area but I wanted to learn some structural biology first. Then I went to David Agars lab as a postdoc, and he was working on so many different exciting problems. As I started working on protein folding, it was really clear all the different ways it could go and all the different ways you could approach it from computer science to chemistry to biology. Then when I came to the UW, I started really completely changed from what I had been doing in Randy’s lab, but I had seen a lot of different kind of research environments. I also had a pretty broad background. I knew enough biology, so that once we started designing proteins, I started with that idea of what kind of applications might be interesting. I think even the social studies and philosophy background in college for a long time I thought that was totally useless, but a lot of what I do, you have to think about pretty general ideas and write. Clear writing is really important and I had to write so many papers on rather esoteric topics back then that’s been a very useful skill to have.

Smith: I can see how it plays in very much also in the sort of real world application of your work because you are working in a very basic science discipline, and yet you’re thinking about how to apply these to real world problems.

Baker: Yes.

Smith: Another example of you staying put is that you never left University of Washington. It was obviously the place that suited you. You went back home to Seattle and that was where you wanted to be.

Baker: Let’s see, I grew up in Seattle. I left when I was 17 to go to college. I was on the east coast for that. Then I went to California for graduate school and postdoc. Then I came back here when I was about 30. I came back to Seattle. My wife and I both had jobs here. I love the mountains. I had a wonderful day skiing and very deep powder last yesterday. I like backcountry skiing, hiking and climbing so the mountains are great. At the time we came here, we had small kids, so it was great that my parents were here and other relatives. I’ve never been very interested in leaving.

Smith: It sounds to me like you sort of know who you are. It may be a silly thing to say, but I think a lot of people spend time trying to find out where they want to be or whether they want to go down the path of being directors of institutes or whether they want to be bench scientists and all of that sort of thing. It seems to have come fairly naturally to you.

Baker: I think I am probably a little bit unusual for Nobel Prize laureates, in terms of having had no idea what I wanted to do when I was in college. At age 20, I had no clue. I think people who are friends of mine from college reading about this were probably totally surprised because I was a social studies major. I did take one chemistry class and it was by far my worst class. It’s kind of ironic in a way. I guess my advice to people is actually not worry too much about the future – just try and do what you find most exciting and interesting in any given time and that things can work out. Because it really wasn’t until I came here, I was well into my thirties before we started working on protein design. I had kind of explored a lot of different things, a lot of different areas and a lot of different aspects of biology. You can’t predict the future.

Smith: I remember watching a conversation once between a young scientist and a Nobel Prize laureate. The young scientist kept on asking questions about their career and kept coming back to that word career. After a while, the laureate sort of scratched his head and repeated the word career as if it was a word that was new to him that he hadn’t really heard before. He said, ‘yes, I never really thought much about a career, you just did the next experiment’.

Baker: Yes, I completely agree with that. A career assumes that they’re sort of like these finite different pre-ordained paths and I don’t think that’s how life works at all. Certainly for me, nothing I did was very orthodox along the way.

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Smith: In the banquet speeches at the Nobel banquet on 10 December, just before your banquet speech, Geoffrey Hinton gave a speech and he said he used basically those two minutes to warn the world of the dangers of AI. Then you gave a very hopeful speech, not specifically on AI of course, but talking about the potential of protein design and understanding protein folding and combining techniques to solve problems in the world. How do you view the dangers potential of AI generally?

Baker: AI is clearly a very powerful technique and the problems that are being solved, protein structure and protein design, obviously far others is really impressive. The language models with these incredible answers to complex queries. I view AI though as just the latest in millennia worth of advances that humanity has made. New tools, techniques and things come about ranging from fire a very long time ago, which was very useful, for example, through nuclear power and nuclear weapons. I mean nuclear weapons, the destructive capabilities are obviously far outweigh those of anything else that have been developed. All these things have upsides and downsides. With AI, I think the biggest dangers probably are systemic misinformation and hacking. I think AI powered weapons, both at sort of physical weapons and just sort of sabotage of infrastructure are all very dangerous. But the upsides of AI are also very clear. It’s just the latest of many advances made by humans. I am not one of the people who’s worried about the existential threat that AI is gonna become smarter than us and control us. I think AI is just a tool that humans will use. I’m much more worried about bad humans getting a hold of very powerful AI tools and doing bad things, and the same way that one worries about bad actors having access to nuclear weapons, but the extensional threat I am less concerned about.

Smith: I suppose you’re somebody who makes use of tools as they come available.

Baker: Yes, and I think that’s what humanity has done generally. New things come about and they seem really revolutionary, and then people take them in stride and you consult chatGPT on your phone every time there’s something that you don’t remember. When I can get chatbot to take care of all my email and all the other stuff I don’t really want to do, then I’ll be happy. I think there’s a lot of potential for freeing people up to do more interesting things.

Smith: Yes. I suppose you could be characterised as the ultimate early adopter, I’d say.

Baker: Yes, that’s right. That’s true.

Smith: I also wanted to come back to this point you made about the diversity of people in your institute and how people come from all around the world. It is so important that there is free movement and free exchange of peoples, isn’t it?

Baker: Absolutely. There’s so many different places in the world that people come from and so many different viewpoints, although it’s currently not a popular topic. The people who run the US government, they’re clearly wrong historically. I think having a diverse research group just makes it more vibrant and fun. I think there’s more problems you can solve since you’re more aware of more different things going out in the world.

Smith: Your institute is the embodiment of an open country. Do you get involved at all in politics and talking about the need to maintain that?

Baker: Right. I think the particular issue I remember when Randy Schekman got the Nobel Prize, I asked him what his issue would be and he asked me what I meant. I said, well, now you have some increased stature, it’s your sort of obligation to try and use this to do good. For me it’s very clearly immigration. I have talked a lot with government leaders about immigration and I’m certainly trying to emphasise the importance of open immigration policy wherever I can. I brought it up in my Nobel speech for example, and I’m trying to help people who are running into immigration issues. I think that’s really important. Having barriers that prevent people from being able to do what they want to are just, it’s just really bad. It hurts everybody. It hurts the person, it hurts the United States most of all. Almost everything that’s ever happened in the US that’s been great has come from an immigrant or a descendant of an immigrant, and it’s just not good for the world either.

Smith: You strike me as somebody who’s very optimistic though, and I imagine that in the current climate you’re not feeling just ultimately depressed by it, but just feeling that things will change.

Baker: I think for a lot of these issues, there’s a sort of a continuum, so if you look at US policy on immigration, say the Trump direction is going to considerably less open, more restrictive, but still on the scheme of things the US is a relatively open country compared to many others. I imagine that there’s going to be the swinging back and forth as really the US public’s general opinion changes and new leaders come about who can make compelling cases for the other side. I think we’re seeing slipping in one direction. I think we’re going to see a return, it’s going to be shifting back and forth.

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Smith: I wanted to ask you about those gifts you gave to the the Nobel Prize Museum? A broken ski pole.

Baker: The first gift was a broken ski pole. As I said, I spend a lot of time backcountry skiing, in the middle of nowhere, considerably away from civilization, climbing, hiking and backpacking. I have broken many ski poles. When I first heard of that I needed to give a gift. That was what I came to. It sort of symbolises a couple things. One is overcoming adversity, because when you break a ski pole, you still have to get out and it’s not always easy. Then it also sort of symbolizes my love for the mountains. The second gift was a pair of the orange glasses you saw me wearing at the beginning. It also symbolizes overcoming adversity. I had an eye injury a couple years ago and I couldn’t look at computer screens and it was absolutely terrible until I discovered these orange glasses of mine. They completely solved the problem. There was an even upside, because I had a new persona and I got these wonderful pictures from colleagues of rooms of people all wearing these glasses.

Smith: Yes, I can attest to the fact that they certainly make you look cool.

Baker: Which is not something I’ve been generally very good at.

Smith: It’s nice to hear that you go skiing and you take Sundays off. How hard do you work?

Baker: I have quite a few graduate students in postdocs. I feel it’s my job to really know what everyone’s doing all the time and to be connecting people. Also there’s always new manuscripts being written up. During the week I am pretty much on, it’s nice to have a relaxed conversation like this because normally I might have 10 half an hour meetings with students a day. There might be a research presentation, then I often just have sort of ideas or someone has an idea about something we should brainstorm. There is a lot going on during the week. I find on the weekend having a day to just get out in nature. When you’re skiing, you’re just looking at snow and you’re trying to decide which direction you should go. You have to make decisions, but the number of bits coming into your brain is far fewer. I find that an important part of my job actually, to give my brain some chance to recover and recharge for the next week.

Smith: I’d like to think that this conversation is giving you a chance to recharge for the conversation you are about to go into no doubt immediately.

Baker: That’s true.

Smith: It’s tremendously exciting. Even just getting a glimpse into this dynamic world you’ve created. Your institute seems pretty unusual actually. Lots of people try and get this environment. I remember in a previous life I used to visit lots of pharma companies and everybody talked about doing exactly what you have done, which is getting a small space where people have sort of crammed in and need to be talking to each other and are just buzzing with ideas. But it’s very difficult to actually make. Do you feel your institute is something very special?

Baker: I think it is very special and I think there are a couple factors. One is we’re just at the historical moment in history where the protein design problem is being solved and this is kind of the grand central station for that. We just have this culture of bringing in brilliant people from all over. I think we’re constantly getting queries and new graduate students want to come in, new postdocs want to come in. I think there are 35 first year graduate students who are doing stints in the lab this year to see if they like it. We have post-doc candidates coming and visiting all the time. I think what makes it unique is probably just the incredible collection of people who are here. The huge opportunity to make the world a better place with protein design. We’ve been really fortunate to be able to attract philanthropic support, which is of course, important to keep this whole thing going. That is one of my jobs too, to try and continue that because that is really important. I think it’s just the right time in history for this problem. I think that’s recognised by the world and by people around the world. You need that to create this kind of environment and then you need to set up the culture where it really works.

Smith: Last question before I let you go back out into the concourse with all your brilliant people, you spin out a lot of companies and that’s also an important part of your work, do you see that as making the ideas work? Do you see it as getting money for the institute? What’s the rationale behind it?

Baker: Primarily what we’re doing here is we’re making sort of advances, but in sort of an academic setting. To really bring these things out in the world they have to leave the institute. As I said, we have all these brilliant, incredibly energetic people coming in, and many of them get so attached to the ideas that they’ve had and the proteins they’ve designed that they want to continue and bring them out in the world. Then they start a company to do this. That’s happening all the time. Literally as we speak, new people or people after they’ve been here for a couple years have made some new advance and then they want to start a company to really bring it out in the world. That’s why it becomes sort of the career of the person who came here to make a discovery and it’s really important to get things out in the world.

Smith: It’s truly an incubator. Let me release you back to those who need you. It was really lovely. Thank you very much indeed.

MUSIC

Svensson: You just heard Nobel Prize Conversations. If you’d like to learn more about David Baker, you can go to nobelprize.org where you’ll find a wealth of information about the prizes and the people behind the discoveries. Nobel Prize Conversations is a podcast series with Adam Smith, a co-production of Filt and Nobel Prize Outreach. The producer for this episode was me, Karin Svensson. The editorial team also includes Andrew Hart and Olivia Lundqvist. Music by Epidemic Sound. If you’d like to hear from another scientist who has pushed the boundaries of our human understanding, listen to our earlier episode with physics laureate John Mather. You can find previous seasons and conversations on Acast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.

Nobel Prize Conversations is produced in cooperation with Fundación Ramón Areces.