Harvard professor wins Nobel in chemistry

Martin Karplus, the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Harvard, is one of three winners of the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced this morning.

The 83-year-old Vienna-born theoretical chemist, who is also affiliated with the Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France, is a 1951 graduate of Harvard College and earned his Ph.D. in 1953 at the California Institute of Technology.

He shared the Nobel with researchers Michael Levitt of Stanford University and Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Warshel was once a postdoctoral student of Karplus, who had worked with both men during six months in Israel during the 1960s. All three were then at the Weizmann Institute of Science with chemist Shneior Lifson, but have not worked formally together since then.

According to the Nobel website, the prize was awarded for the researchers’ work in “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.”

Before dawn, in a downstairs hallway at his Irving Street house in Cambridge, Karplus already was turned out neatly in a dress shirt and dark pants, his only concession to the early hour being a pair of brown leather slippers.

He fielded calls from American, European, and Latin American news outlets. One interview was in French and another in German, languages he speaks fluently. He needed a translator for several calls in Spanish from Colombia. “It’s been one call after another,” he said.

“And hundreds of emails,” added his wife, Marci.

Most reporters calling the professor got an added soundtrack, with occasional barks from the family dog, a skittish 2-year-old cockapoo named Bib.

“I was sound asleep,” Karplus said of his 5:30 awakening at his home, which is on a shady street five minutes from Harvard Yard. Usually, he said, “you only get calls at 5 o’clock in the morning when it’s bad news.”

But first things first. Breakfast was blue cheese on toast, with bacon, coffee, and orange juice. With him was Marci, who is his lab administrator at Harvard, and his son, Mischa. (Two older daughters live out of town.) The phone kept ringing, and the message from Marci as he ate was always: Call back in 10 minutes, please.

“It’s clear,” she said later, “this is not going to slow down.”

More was ahead. There would be a champagne toast in late morning in the chemistry library with the department faculty. A formal press conference would take place in early afternoon.

While still in his living room, Karplus said that most reporters repeated at least two questions: What was it like to get the Nobel Prize call? (“It was nice to hear,” he said. “I’ve known I was nominated for quite a few years.”) And they asked him to explain his work “in simple terms,” said Karplus, who studies the structure and dynamics of molecules. “If you like how a machine works, you take it apart,” he said. “We do that for molecules.”

The Karplus lab website at Harvard describes his research as “directed toward understanding the electronic structure, geometry, and dynamics of molecules of chemical and biological interest.” In use are, among other things, “semi-empirical quantum mechanics, theoretical and computational statistical mechanics, classical and quantum dynamics.”

Harvard President Drew Faust released a written statement saying, “We are very proud to celebrate Martin Karplus’ groundbreaking research today. Professor Karplus and his fellow researchers harnessed the power of technology to map, as the Nobel committee put it in honoring them, ‘the mysterious ways of chemistry.’ In so doing, they reached beyond the boundaries of conventional thinking in chemistry to align the workings of classical physics with quantum physics, and they provided the scientific community with crucial tools that have enabled many of the advances made in contemporary chemistry.”

With Karplus’ award, 47 current and former Harvard faculty members have received Nobels for wide-ranging work, including the tissue culture breakthrough that led to creation of the polio vaccine, negotiations that led to an armistice in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the first description of the structure of DNA, pioneering procedures for organ transplants, the development of gross national product as a measure of national economic change, poetry, and much more.

In 2012, Alvin E. Roth, a Harvard economist whose practical applications of mathematical theories have transformed markets ranging from public school assignments to kidney donations to medical resident job placements, won the Nobel economics prize.

Prior to that, in 2009, Jack Szostak, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital, won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Szostak’s work not only revealed a key cellular function, but also illuminated processes involved in disease and aging.

In 2005, physicist Roy Glauber won for his work on the nature and behavior of light, and Thomas Schelling won in economics for work on conflict and cooperation in game theory. Previous winners in the past decade include Linda Buck in physiology or medicine in 2004, Riccardo Giacconi in physics in 2002, and A. Michael Spence in economics in 2001.

source:news.harvard.edu

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Ditulis oleh William Perkasa pada tanggal Thursday, October 10, 2013