Demis Hassabis, 48, Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner, spent time in S'pore as a child as mum's S'porean Chinese

Demis Hassabis was awarded the Nobel Prize on Oct. 9, 2024.

He is one of the three winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

And he has a Singapore connection.

The 48-year-old was born in North London to a Greek Cypriot father and Chinese Singaporean mother.

Both his parents reportedly worked as teachers.

And it was Singapore that sparked Hassabis' interest in tech, he said previously.

He had spent his summers on the island until he turned 10, which allowed him to immerse in video games and the technology behind it.

He said he was able to buy "so many cool gadgets" in the early 1980s in Singapore that were from Japan, which he could not get in Britain at that time.

"I remember getting Nintendo Game and Watch's Donkey Kong. That was my favourite," he told The Straits Times in 2016.

He described Singapore "as this magical futuristic world", and has always seen it that way.

Family background

Hassabis previously described his parents in 2014 as "quite bohemian", according to The Standard of London.

His mother worked for the department store chain John Lewis, while his father was a singer-songwriter among a variety of things he did.

"Neither of them are technical at all, which is quite bizarre," Hassabis said.

"My parents are technophobes. They don't really like computers," he told The Guardian in 2016.

"So, yeah, it's weird. I'm not quite sure where all this came from."

His younger brother and sister took after their parents.

His sister is a composer and pianist, while his brother studied creative writing.

Hassabis was often described as a polymath.

He taught himself to write computer programmes when he was just eight.

He was the second-highest ranked under-14 chess player in the world.

He finished his A-levels two years early.

He then went on to code the multi-million selling simulation game "Theme Park" at age 17.

He founded his own video game company after completing a computer science degree at the University of Cambridge.

He then got a doctorate in neuroscience.

In 2010, Hassabis, in his mid-30s, founded an AI start-up, DeepMind, with close friends.

Google acquired it about four years later in January 2014 for US$650 million (S$848 million).

About the trio awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Along with John Jumper and David Baker, the trio were recognised for their work on advanced technology, including artificial intelligence, to predict the complex structures of proteins.

Hassabis and Jumper are collaborators at Google DeepMind.

Both of them were credited specifically for creating a technology that has sped up the discovery of medicines and creation of new biological tools.

The technology is able to predict the physical shape of proteins and enzymes to a high degree.

On receiving the Nobel prize, Hassabis said, according to Reuters: "it's totally surreal, to be honest, quite overwhelming".

Top photos via University College London