Arieh Warshel · Science & Medicine
Computational chemist who, with Michael Levitt, published the first computer model of an enzymatic reaction (the QM/MM approach); Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013
20 November 1940, Kibbutz Sde Nahum, Mandatory Palestine (now Israel)
Sde Nahum · Haifa · Rehovot · Cambridge · Los Angeles
Arieh Warshel is recognized among Israeli contributors to Science & Medicine — Computational chemist who, with Michael Levitt, published the first computer model of an enzymatic reaction (the QM/MM approach); Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013
Origins and early life
Arieh Warshel was born on 20 November 1940 at Kibbutz Sde Nahum, in the Beit She'an Valley of British Mandate Palestine, to a Jewish family, and grew up in the kibbutz children's house. He served in the army from August 1958, prepared alone for an external matriculation, and entered the Technion in Haifa, graduating in chemistry in 1966. At the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, under Shneior Lifson, he took a master's degree in 1967 and a doctorate in 1969, and with Michael Levitt built the consistent force field, which computes the shape and vibrations of any molecule.
Work and career
Called up as a reserve officer, he fought on the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War of 1967 and again in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and reached the rank of captain. From 1970 he worked with Martin Karplus at Harvard on a program, published in 1972, that applied quantum physics to a molecule's free electrons and classical physics to everything else, and in 1974 he rejoined Levitt in Cambridge, England. There the two coupled the quantum and classical descriptions consistently, and in 1976 they published the first computer model of an enzymatic reaction, the founding work of the QM/MM approach.
He moved that February to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he has taught ever since, and from 1978 argued that enzymes owe their power to electrostatics, their polar groups already placed to stabilise the reaction.
Recognition
He shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Martin Karplus and Michael Levitt, a third each, for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems. Married to Tamar since August 1966 and the father of two daughters, Merav and Yael, he opened the Warshel Institute for Computational Biology in Shenzhen in April 2017 and told his own story in 2021 in From Kibbutz Fishponds to The Nobel Prize.
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Source: Wikipedia — Arieh Warshel
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Computational chemist who, with Michael Levitt, published the first computer model of an enzymatic reaction (the QM/MM approach); Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013
Source: Wikipedia — Arieh Warshel
