Hassabis was a chess prodigy, then a game designer as a teenager, then a neuroscientist. All of it was preparation for one goal: build general AI and point it at science.
DeepMind got famous for AlphaGo, but the result that matters most is AlphaFold, which predicts how proteins fold. Biologists had spent decades on that problem. The predictions are now free for anyone to use, and he shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it.