Nobel Prize in Chemistry Shared by Israeli Scientists, American Jew

Posted on October 9, 2013 by JNS.org.(JNS.org) Two Israeli scientists and one American Jewish scientist will share the Nobel Prize in chemistry for work that made it possible “to map the mysterious ways of chemistry by using computers,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced.

The winners include Arieh Warshel, an Israeli-American professor at the University of Southern California; Martin Karplus, a Jewish citizen of the U.S. and Austria who researches at the University of Strasbourg and Harvard University; and Michael Levitt, an American, British, and Israeli citizen who works at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

“The work of Karplus, Levitt and Warshel is ground-breaking in that they managed to make Newton’s classical physics work side-by-side with the fundamentally different quantum physics,” the Swedish academy said in a statement. “Previously, chemists had to choose to use either/or.”

“In short, what we developed is a way which requires computers to look, to take the structure of the protein and then to eventually understand how exactly it does what it does,” Warshel told reporters.