3 win Nobel chemistry for cyber experiments
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Three US-based scientists won this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry yesterday for developing powerful computer models that any researcher can use to understand complex chemical interactions and create new drugs.
Research in the 1970s by Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel has led to programs that unveil chemical processes such as how exhaust fumes are purified or how photosynthesis takes place in green leaves, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. That kind of knowledge makes it possible to optimize catalysts for cars or design drugs and solar cells.
The strength of the winning work is that it can be used to study all kinds of chemistry, the academy said.
“This year’s prize is about taking the chemical experiment to cyberspace,” said Staffan Normark, the academy’s secretary.
All three scientists became US citizens. Karplus, an 83-year-old US and Austrian citizen, splits his time between the University of Strasbourg, France, and Harvard University. The academy said Levitt, 66, is a British, US, and Israeli citizen and a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. Warshel, 72, is a US and Israeli citizen affiliated with the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Levitt said the award recognized him for work he had done when he was 20, before he even had his PhD. “It was just me being in the right place at the right time and maybe having a few good ideas,” he said.
“It’s sort of nice in more general terms to see that computational science, computational biology is being recognized,” he said. “It’s become a very large field and it’s always in some ways been the poor sister, or the ugly sister, to experimental biology.”
Warshel said he was “extremely happy” to have been woken up in the middle of the night in Los Angeles to find out he would share the US$1.2 million prize and looks forward to collecting it in the Swedish capital in December.
“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,” he said.
When scientists wanted to simulate complex chemical processes on computers, they used to have to choose between software that was based on quantum physics, which applies on the scale of an atom, or classical Newtonian physics, which operates at larger scales.
The academy said the three laureates developed computer models that “opened a gate between these two worlds.”
Jeremy Berg, a professor of computational and systems biology at the University of Pittsburgh, said the winning work gives scientists a way to understand complicated reactions that involve thousands to millions of atoms.
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