SEATTLE, Wash. — A University of Washington Medicine biochemist is now a Nobel Prize winner.
David Baker, a Seattle native and Garfield High School graduate, got the call at 2:00 a.m., Wednesday. His wife, Hannele Ruhoho-Baker, told KOMO News she heard the phone buzzing, looked at the screen, and saw “Sweden” so she handed it to David.
“And they say, ‘Is this David Baker?’ He says ‘This is David Baker.’ And then they say, ‘You won the Nobel Prize.’ And I got very excited,” she explained. The next calls went out to their children.
“Then I called my son and my daughter, and apparently, they had already called my son. They had got the wrong number. And he said, no, no, it’s my dad,” said Ruhoho-Baker, also a professor at UW Medicine.
KOMO News also learned the UW had people on standby overnight, waiting for the Nobel Committee’s announcement since the general feeling amongst other scientists on campus was that it wasn’t a matter of whether Baker would ever win. It was when.
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When KOMO News caught up with Baker on campus mid-morning, he said he hadn’t slept since that early morning phone call. He remained rather humble while he explained his work of creating proteins to solve some of the world’s most complex problems.
“And yeah, this is, I think, really a prize for all of us,” he said to cheers. Baker founded the Institute for Protein Design (IPD) back in 2012.
“I think he has this enormous capacity. Imagine having 120 people in your lab, and you know exactly what everyone’s doing, their projects, how to connect them, how to guide them, and I think it’s just a privilege to work with him,” Ljubica Mihaljevic PhD, a postdoc who joined the IPD in 2022, told KOMO News.
First, they design a protein on the computer, then they create it and test it in the lab.
“We get the proteins out, and then we figure out what they do, then we determine whether they actually do what we wanted them to do,” Baker explained while giving KOMO News a tour of his lab. He spent years developing the tools necessary to design these synthetic proteins to solve big problems like cancer.
“Use those tools to make a protein that can specifically only target the cancer, but not target it in your healthy cells,” Nathan Greenwood, an IPD researcher, explained for KOMO News.
“So, I think for me, the challenge is to pick important problems that I think can be solved by a brilliant person,” said Baker.
“It is things that we have as humans not been able to do ever, right?” Mohamad Abedi PhD, a postdoc who joined the IPD in 2021, told KOMO News. A few feet from the researchers working on the cancer project, another student was working on a protein to degrade plastics.
“So, plastics are long molecules, and the long molecules stick together,” Baker explained. He said they’re designing proteins to chop those long molecules into small pieces so they would no longer be plastic.
“The students here are absolutely amazing. They’re brilliant. They come from all over the world,” Baker boasted while showing KOMO News a map on the wall with pins stuck in many countries, representing the diversity in his lab.
“And really, if you hear about protein design and you’re a student, you come to the University of Washington, and this is pretty much the place where you make your fortune,” said Baker. Abedi, from Pakistan, and Mihaljevic from Serbia, both told KOMO News just what an incredible mentor Baker is to everyone in the lab.
“The motto that he has is that if it’s not fun, don’t do it. And I like that he has this childlike curiosity that brings it back in me, and I think that just nurturing this creativity and his trainees is something that brought him this far, and it will bring him even further,” Mihaljevic told KOMO News.
Baker is so loved, that as the news spread through campus, a group of his students started cranking out buttons with pictures of him to celebrate.
“He just has a passion for this. So, it’s not working. It’s living with your dream,” Baker’s wife said of her husband.
“I think everyone here is making major contributions. I’m so excited about the future and what we can all do together,” said Baker.