Nobel in chemistry awarded to Martin Karplus
Martin Karplus, the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry Emeritus in Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology is one of three to share in the Nobel Prize in chemistry, the The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced this morning. The Nobel Prize in chemistry 2013 was awarded jointly to Karplus, A.B. ’51, Michael Levitt, and Arieh Warshel “for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems,” according to the Nobel committee. With Karplus’ award, 47 current and former Harvard faculty members have been recipients of Nobel Prizes for wide-ranging work, including the tissue culture breakthrough that led to the 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, poetry, pioneering procedures for organ transplants, the development of Gross National Product as a measure of national economic change, and much more. In 2012, Alvin E. Roth, a...