Michael-Levitt, Martin-Karplus, Arieh-Warshel (Left to Right)

In 2004, along with their Jewish-American peer Irwin-Rose, two Israeli bio-chemists Aaron-Ciechanover, Avram-Hershko shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry of that year. Nine years later, in 2013, the formula of “2+1=3” reappeared. However, it is noteworthy that the two Israeli laureates in 2013, Michael-Levitt and Arieh-Warshel are of American citizenship too, while the third one, Martin-Karplus is an Austrian-born Jewish-American. The prize motivation for the threesome was “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems”.

Michael-Levitt, the youngest among the threesome, was born into a Jewish family in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1947. His father was from Lithuania while his mother from Czech. When he was 15, the whole family resettled in the U.K. In 1967, at the age of merely 20, Michael-Levitt graduated with a first-class honors degree in Physics from the King’s College London. It was in the same year did him pay his very first visit to Israel and met Rina, who later became his wife there. The couple moved back to the Great Britain the next year for Michael-Levitt was accepted by the Cambridge University. In Cambridge, Michael-Levitt gradually became more and more determined about the path to take and goals to chase after in his academic career.

In 1979 Michael-Levitt, graduated PhD in computational biology from the Cambridge University, headed to Israel for the second time. He taught in the Weizmann Institute of Science and obtained his Israeli passport in 1980. From 1986 on, Michael-Levitt has been teaching in the Stanford University. Globally, Michael-Levitt is one of the first researchers who made the attempt to conduct molecular dynamic simulations of DNA and protein, also he even developed the first software for this purpose.

Arieh-Warshel was born in a Kibbutz near Beit-She’an (an Israeli city today) in 1947. His experience is different from many scientists who spent most of their lifetime under the roof of a lab or an institute, for he used to serve in the IDF for a long time. Arieh-Warshel attended the “Six-Day War” and the “Yom-Kippur War”, fought in the Golan Heights twice. When the war in 1967 ended, Arieh-Warshel was enrolled to the Weizmann Institute of Science and obtained his doctoral degree in just two years, also it was during the two years when he met Michael-Levitt as well as Martin-Karplus, who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with him decades later. After the “Yom-Kippur War”, Arieh-Warshel retired as a lieutenant from the army. He flew across the Atlantic in 1974 to conduct his research in the Harvard University; then in 1976, he made another leap from the East Coast to the West Coast, teaching in the University of Southern California till today. 

Martin-Karplus, the eldest one, was born in 1930 in Vienna, Austria. Back in his childhood, his parents decided to flee away from Europe because of the antisemitism, which was on its significant rise after the “Anschluss” in 1938. They managed to obtain visitor visas and thus came to the USA successfully. Martin-Karplus’s talent in chemistry was shown very early when he did a good job in the Westinghouse Science Talent Research Competition in 1944. He was accepted by the Medical School of Harvard University at the age of 17 in 1947, but he changed his mind in his fresh year and chose to study in the program of physics and chemistry. In 1950, after graduated from Harvard University, Martin-Karplus applied for the program of biology studies of Caltech and obtained his doctorate there when he was only 23. For further studies, he headed to University of Oxford and worked as a post-doctoral researcher there for two years. After a total of a dozen years’ teaching in University of Illinois and Columbia University respectively, Martin-Karplus returned to the Harvard University in 1967 to work in the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department. In addition to his excellent academic devotions, Martin-Karplus is also a first-class photographer who has set a series of personal photography exhibitions.

Michael-Levitt, Arieh-Warshel and  Martin-Karplus brought the system of computer model into the field of chemical studies so that the process of complex chemical reactions could be simulated on the computer.Thanks to their work, computer for chemists now is a sio important tool as test tube.