Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt, Arieh Warshel (left to right)STEPHANIE MITCHELL/HARVARD STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER, KEILANA/WIKIMEDIA, WIKIMEDIAMartin Karplus of Harvard University and Université de Strasbourg in France, Michael Levitt of the Stanford University School of Medicine, and Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California have been awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing computational tools to dissect chemical reactions.
“Computer models mirroring real life have become crucial for most advances made in chemistry today,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which announced the winners in Stockholm this morning (October 9), said in a press release. And Karplus, Levitt, and Warshel have all made significant contributions to “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems,” according to the prize announcement.
In the 1970s, the trio laid the groundwork for the use of computer modeling to predict the outcomes of diverse chemical reactions—from lysozyme cleavage of a glycoside chain to drug-target interactions. Since then, they have each continued to advance the field of computational chemistry, allowing researchers to delve into the structural changes that molecules experience as they interact with other entities, for example, and ...
