Michael Levitt (born 1947): The Physicist Who Taught Computers About Proteins

Introduction

Michael Levitt is a South African-born biophysicist and structural biologist, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. As a young man in the late 1960s and 1970s he wrote some of the first programs to model proteins on a computer, and with Arieh Warshel he created simplified and multiscale models that could handle systems far too large for pure quantum mechanics. In 2013 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel. He is a citizen of the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel, a reflection of his international career.

Early Life and Family

Levitt was born on 9 May 1947 in Pretoria, South Africa, to a Jewish family. He grew up in South Africa and attended school there, and he moved abroad to study. He is known to have been fascinated by science and mathematics from an early age. His later career took him from Britain to Israel to the United States, and he has said that this international path was shaped by a wish to work where the best scientific opportunities were.

Education and Mentors

Levitt studied physics at King's College London and graduated in 1967. He then moved to the Weizmann Institute in Israel, where he worked with the theoretical chemist Shneior Lifson on the first programs for protein energy minimisation, and met Arieh Warshel, then a graduate student. He went on to the University of Cambridge and obtained his PhD in 1971 while working at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), one of the world's leading centres of molecular biology. Cambridge exposed him to experimental structural biology and to the problems that computers could address. After further research posts in Israel and Britain, he moved to the USA.

Career Timeline

Major Scientific Contributions

Levitt's work is a chain of firsts in computational structural biology. In 1969 he and Lifson wrote an early program for energy minimisation of a protein using a force field. In the mid-1970s, with Warshel, he introduced a simplified representation of proteins, with two interaction centres per residue, to explore folding. The 1976 lysozyme paper by Warshel and Levitt gave the first multiscale description of an enzyme reaction. Later he developed methods to compare and classify protein structures, studied nucleic acid structure and evolution, and contributed to the community assessments of protein structure prediction. See our companion discovery post for the chemistry of his methods and the exam points.

Awards, Honours and Nobel Prize

• Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013, shared with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel, "for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".
• Membership of the US National Academy of Sciences.
• Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford University, where he has led a research group on computational biology.

Personality, Struggles and Lesser-Known Facts

• Young pioneer. Levitt began his computational work while still in his early twenties, at a time when most biologists had never seen a computer.
• Limited computing power. Early calculations ran on machines with a tiny fraction of the power of a modern smartphone, which forced creative simplification.
• Triple citizenship. He holds American, British and Israeli citizenship, linked to his career in the three countries.
• Interest beyond proteins. His later work included the statistics of RNA and DNA structure, and he has taken part in public discussions of data analysis in science, sometimes sparking debate.
• Outspoken style. Colleagues describe him as direct and curious, often challenging accepted ideas and encouraging young scientists to question assumptions.

Legacy and Influence on Modern Chemistry

Levitt's ideas contributed to the transformation of biology into a quantitative, computational science. His minimisation methods and force fields became the basis of programs used worldwide in drug design. The multiscale approach lets researchers model reactions in enzymes, motions of ion channels and the assembly of large complexes. Today's machine-learning methods for structure prediction rely on large databases of structures, a field in which his lab and his collaborators have long been active. The Nobel citation expressed the key message: chemists now run experiments on computers as well as in flasks.

Lessons for Students

• Learn programming early. Computation is now a core tool in every branch of chemistry.
• Simplify wisely. A model need not be complete; it needs to be useful.
• Be open to moving between countries and fields. Levitt's route from physics to biology across continents gave him unusual breadth.
• Collaborate. The Nobel was shared by three people who each contributed different pieces.

FAQ

Where does Michael Levitt work?

At Stanford University School of Medicine in California, where he has been a professor of structural biology since 1987.

Who were his scientific partners?

Shneior Lifson and Arieh Warshel in his early career, and later many students and collaborators in structural biology.

Why did he win a Chemistry rather than a Physics prize?

The prize recognised the development of models for chemical systems, even though his training was in physics.

What is a multiscale model?

A model that combines different levels of detail, such as quantum mechanics for the reacting atoms and classical mechanics for the surrounding protein and solvent.

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