adminSTOCKHOLM. – Three scientists won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry yesterday for developing computer models to simulate chemical processes, providing a revolutionary tool for drug designers and engineers.Martin Karplus, a US-Austrian citizen, Michael Levitt, a US-British citizen, and Arieh Warshel of the US and Israel were honoured “for the development of multi-scale models for complex chemical systems,” the Nobel jury said.
The three were being recognised for “taking the experiment to cyberspace,” it added. Chemists all over the world simulate complex experiments on their computers thanks to work by the trio that dates back to the 1970s, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.
“I was doing work before my post doc when I was 20 years old to write a computer programme. I guess I wrote a pretty good programme,” Levitt, now 66, told AFP by telephone from his California home.
He said that it was “essentially” this programme that lay at the core of Wednesday’s Nobel prize, and people benefitted from it to this day.
“I was speaking to a doctoral student yesterday and he was able to do a calculation that used to take two hours and now takes a 100th of a second,” Levitt said. “It makes a huge difference!”
Karplus (83), said it was a nice surprise to be awakened before dawn with the news of the prize.
“Usually, if it’s that time of the day, it’s not good news,” he told AFP.
“I am very pleased that this field of research is finally being recognised as important. For years we were told that it didn’t work and we couldn’t do calculations like that for complex molecules.”
Warshel (72), said in an interview posted on the official Nobel website that he hoped the prize would help overcome reluctance to accepting computers in chemistry.
“It will become much clearer that, as I keep writing, it’s the best tool to know what really happens inside the biological molecule,” he said.
The Nobel jury said the tool is “universal”, helping pharmaceutical engineers to design new drugs or engineers to make cleaner energy sources or smarter manufactured products.
The three combined classical physics with quantum physics – two previously rival worlds – in computer models designed to predict chemical reactions.
Such reactions can take place, for instance, between industrial chemicals or in biological functions, when an enzyme cuts a protein, a virus penetrates a cell or or a cell divides. – AFP.
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