USA. Stanford University. 2015. Michael Levitt, 2013 Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry. Photographed at his home in Palo Alto. Known for work in computational structural biology, specifically the computer-aided
analysis of protein. Chemical reactions happen faster than the human eye can see, so it's very difficult to study the details of those reactions in the lab in real time. So Levitt (and two other scientists in the 1970s) wrote computer programs that simulate chemical reactions. They then were able to slow down the simulations and understand exactly how the chemical reactions worked. As one of the first people to apply computers to the study of biology, Levitt won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2013 “for developing multi-scale computer models for complex chemical systems.” As for the implications for human health: Understanding the precise shape/structure of biological molecules is the first step in designing drugs to alter their function. Levitt’s work has allowed scientists to design drugs more quickly and cheaply by doing their experiments with computer programs instead of inside lab animals.