The 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has gone to Martin Karplus of Harvard, Michael Levitt of Stanford, and Arieh Warshel of USC. This year's prize is one of those that covers a field by recognizing some of its most prominent developers, and this one (for computational methods) has been anticipated for some time. It's good to see it come along, though, since Karplus is now 83, and his name has been on the "Could easily win a Nobel" lists for some years now. (Anyone who's interpreted an NMR spectrum of an organic molecule will know him for a contribution that he's not even cited for by the Nobel committee, the relationship between coupling constants and dihedral angles).

Here's the Nobel Foundation's information on this year's subject matter, and it's a good overview, as usual. This one has to cover a lot of ground, though, because the topic is a large one. The writeup emphasizes (properly) the split between classical and quantum-mechanical approaches to chemical modeling. The former is easier to accomplish (relatively!), but the latter is much more relevant (crucial, in fact) as you get down towards the scale of individual atoms and bonds. Computationally, though, it's a beast. This year's laureates pioneered some very useful techniques to try to have it both ways.

This started to come together in the 1970s, and the methods used were products of necessity. The computing power available wouldn't let you just brute-force your way past many problems, so a lot of work had to go ...

Source: In the Pipeline - October 9, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Chemical News Source Type: blogs