WarSclerotic

Israeli prof Arieh Warshel shares 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry | The Times of Israel.

Another of the three winners, Pretoria-born Michael Levitt, also holds Israeli citizenship. Trio, rounded out by Martin Karplus, win prestigious prize ‘for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.’ My work is mainly motivated by my curiosity, says kibbutz-born Warshel

By Times of Israel staff October 9, 2013, 12:53 pm

Arieh Warshel (photo credit: CC BY Wikipedia)

Israeli professor Arieh Warshel on Wednesday won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, along with professors Martin Karplus and Michael Levitt.

Warshel is a distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he has been since the 1970s.

Fellow winner Michael Levitt, a South Africa-born professor, also holds Israeli citizenship. The third member of the winning trio is Vienna-born Martin Karplus.

The trio won the award “for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced.

Warshel, contacted by the Swedish Academy of Sciences live by phone at 3 a.m. Los Angeles time, shortly after the award was announced, said he had been watching the ceremony live on the Internet, and added cheerily that he felt “extremely well.”

He said his research is motivated largely by his own curiosity. The work for which he and his colleagues were awarded the Nobel is for developing “a method that allowed us to understand how proteins actually work,” he said, and he explained that it was like seeing a watch, wondering what was going on inside, and finding out.

“We developed how a computer can take the structure of a protein, and can understand how it does exactly what it does — for example digesting food,” Warshel said. “You want to understand how it is happening, and then you can use it to design drugs, or in my case, to satisfy your curiosity,” the professor added.

Israel Radio spoke to his brother, Benny Warshel, Wednesday, who said his brother brought great honor to the state of Israel.

“He fough in this country’s wars. In the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War and he defends Israel in academic circles,” said Benny.

“He’s very connected to this country,” he added.

Warshel was born in 1940 in Kibbutz Sde Nahum, in the Beit She’an Valley. He served in the IDF (reaching the rank of captain), then attended Haifa’s Technion, where he got a BSc degree in Chemistry in 1966. He earned MSc and PhD degrees in Chemical Physics (in 1967 and 1969), at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. He then did postdoctoral work at Harvard University, returned to the Weizmann Institute in the early 1970s and also worked for the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, England. He joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at USC in 1976.

Levitt, who was born in Pretoria in 1947, received his BSc from King’s College, London and his PhD in computational biology from the University of Cambridge. He was a Royal Society Exchange Fellow at the Weizmann Institute from 1967-1968, and later returned as a professor of chemical physics from 1980-1987.

Nobel chemistry prize winners (from left) Karplus, Levitt and Warshel (photo credit: Wikipedia Commons)

In its reasoning, the academy noted that in the past, chemists “used to create models of molecules using plastic balls and sticks. Today, the modelling is carried out in computers. In the 1970s, Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel laid the foundation for the powerful programs that are used to understand and predict chemical processes.”

The academy continued, in a statement: “Computer models mirroring real life have become crucial for most advances made in chemistry today. Chemical reactions occur at lightning speed. In a fraction of a millisecond, electrons jump from one atomic nucleus to the other. Classical chemistry has a hard time keeping up; it is virtually impossible to experimentally map every little step in a chemical process. Aided by the methods now awarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, scientists let computers unveil chemical processes, such as a catalyst’s purification of exhaust fumes or the photosynthesis in green leaves.”

It said the work of Karplus, Levitt and Warshel “is groundbreaking in that they managed to make Newton’s classical physics work side-by-side with the fundamentally different quantum physics. Previously, chemists had to choose to use either or. The strength of classical physics was that calculations were simple and could be used to model really large molecules. Its weakness, it offered no way to simulate chemical reactions. For that purpose, chemists instead had to use quantum physics. But such calculations required enormous computing power and could therefore only be carried out for small molecules.”

This year’s Nobel Laureates in chemistry, the academy said, “took the best from both worlds and devised methods that use both classical and quantum physics. For instance, in simulations of how a drug couples to its target protein in the body, the computer performs quantum theoretical calculations on those atoms in the target protein that interact with the drug. The rest of the large protein is simulated using less demanding classical physics. Today the computer is just as important a tool for chemists as the test tube. Simulations are so realistic that they predict the outcome of traditional experiments.”

Vienna-born Karplus is based at the Université de Strasbourg, France, and Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Levitt, who holds UK and Israeli citizenship, works from Stanford University, California. Warshel, who holds US and Israeli citizenship, is a distinguished professor, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

The prize amount, SEK 8 million — some $1.25 million — is to be shared equally between the laureates.

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