Levitt, Michael

Michael Levitt, (born May 9, 1947, Pretoria, South Africa), American British Israeli chemist who was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing accurate computer models of chemical reactions that were able to use features of both classical physics and quantum mechanics. He shared the prize with American-Austrian chemist Martin Karplus and American-Israeli chemist Arieh Warshel.

Levitt received a bachelor’s degree in physics (1967) from King’s College in London. He worked as a visiting fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Reḥovot, Israel, from 1967 to 1968. He received a doctorate in biophysics jointly granted by the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, and the University of Cambridge in 1971. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Weizmann Institute from 1972 to 1974 and a staff scientist at the MRC Laboratory from 1974 to 1979. He became an associate professor in chemical physics at the Weizmann Institute in 1979 and left there as a full professor in 1987. Afterward he became a professor of structural biology at Stanford University in California.

During Levitt’s time as a visiting fellow at the Weizmann Institute, he worked with Warshel (then a graduate student) on computer modeling of molecules using classical physics. In 1972 Levitt reunited with Warshel at the Weizmann Institute and later at the MRC Laboratory. In 1975 they published results of a simulation of protein folding. They had long been interested in reactions involving enzymes, and they constructed a scheme in which they accounted for the interaction between those parts of the enzyme that were modeled classically and those modeled quantum mechanically. They also had to account for the interaction of both parts with the surrounding medium. In 1976 they published a paper that applied their general scheme to the first computer model of an enzymatic reaction. More significantly, their scheme could be used to model any molecule.