Sir Demis Hassabis discovered he had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry this week when his wife — also a scientific researcher — received several calls on Skype to urgently request his phone number.

“My mind was completely frazzled, which hardly ever happens. It was?.?.?.?almost like an out-of-body experience,” said Hassabis, co-founder and chief executive of Google DeepMind, the artificial intelligence division of the Silicon Valley search giant.

The chemistry Nobel, which Hassabis shared with his colleague John Jumper and US biochemist David Baker, was won for unlocking an impossible problem in biology that had remained unsolved for 50 years: predicting the structure of every protein known to humanity, using an AI software known as AlphaFold.