WIKIMEDIA, JONATHUNDERIt’s Nobel season again. On Monday (October 7), the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden crowned James Rothman, Randy Schekman, and Thomas Südhof the winners of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for helping to unravel the details of the cellular transport system. When Schekman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, got the call before dawn, he “snapped to attention,” he told The Scientist. “My heart started to race.”
“They’re three very different people. Each is very intelligent, very purposeful and driven,” said Dartmouth University’s Bill Wickner, who received a call from Schekman that morning to share the good news. “I love each one of them. They're fun, they love to talk shop. They’re good listeners as well as speakers.”
Then on Wednesday (October 9), the Nobel Assembly awarded its annual prize in chemistry to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt, and Arieh Warshel for the development of computer-based methods to model complex systems. The three winners began using computer modeling to predict the outcomes of diverse chemical reactions in the 1970s and continued to refine the computational methodologies throughout their careers.
“With powerful computers it’s quicker to try to calculate how your small molecule will ...
