Martin Karplus · Science & Medicine
Theoretical chemist who pioneered computer simulations of molecules, from the Karplus equation to the first molecular dynamics of a protein; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013
15 March 1930, Vienna, Austria — 28 December 2024, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Vienna · Newton · Pasadena · Urbana · New York · Cambridge (Massachusetts) · Strasbourg
Martin Karplus is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Theoretical chemist who pioneered computer simulations of molecules, from the Karplus equation to the first molecular dynamics of a protein; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013
Origins and early life
Martin Karplus was born in Vienna on 15 March 1930 into what has been described as an intellectual and successful secular Jewish family; his grandfather Johann Paul Karplus was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Vienna. His childhood changed even before the Nazis came: in the spring of 1937 two neighbouring boys who had been his and his brother Robert's best friends turned on them with antisemitic taunts.
A few days after the Anschluss of 13 March 1938 his mother took the two boys to Switzerland on a supposed ski holiday while his father was held in the Vienna jail, partly as a hostage, and the reunited family immigrated to the United States, reaching New York on 8 October 1938.
Work and career
Raised in Newton, near Boston, he was a co-winner of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, graduated from Harvard in 1951 and took his doctorate at Caltech in 1953 under Linus Pauling. At the University of Illinois he worked out how the coupling between two protons depends on the dihedral angle between their bonds, the Karplus equation still used in nuclear magnetic resonance, before moving to Columbia in 1960 and back to Harvard in 1966.
In 1970 Arieh Warshel joined him at Harvard, where they wrote a program treating part of a molecule classically and part with quantum mechanics, and in 1974 used such a model to follow retinal, the molecule of vision, as it changes shape. His group created the CHARMM program and in 1977 published the first molecular dynamics simulation of a protein, the bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitor.
Recognition
From 1996 he also led a research group in Strasbourg, and in 2013 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems. A photographer whose travel pictures were exhibited, he died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 28 December 2024, at ninety-four.
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Source: Wikipedia — Martin Karplus
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Theoretical chemist who pioneered computer simulations of molecules, from the Karplus equation to the first molecular dynamics of a protein; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013
Source: Wikipedia — Martin Karplus
