2013 Nobel Prize In Chemistry

Abstract

Theoretical chemistry doesn’t always get the respect it deserves. This is not one of those times, as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to three theoretical chemists— Martin Karplus of the University of Strasbourg, in France, and Harvard University; Michael Levitt of Stanford University School of Medicine; and Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California. The trio is being recognized “for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.” Beginning some 40 years ago, Karplus, Levitt, and Warshel helped develop computational techniques for modeling processes such as chemical reactions and protein folding. The Nobel citation refers to their success in combining quantum mechanics and molecular mechanics into a technique called QM/MM, which is now a state-of-the-art approach for simulating processes in biomolecular systems. “The beauty of QM/MM is that it overcomes the size restriction of quantum mechanics so you can ...