In the history of physics, Michael Levitt occupies the ground between patient observation and the larger claims it makes possible.
Michael Levitt was born at Pretoria in 1947. His recorded nationality is Israel. He was educated at King's College London and Peterhouse.
Twentieth-century science was collaborative, expensive and political: the questions were pursued by teams, and the answers had consequences that reached well past the laboratory.
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Take the IQ test →The institutions that housed his research were Stanford University, University of Cambridge and Weizmann Institute of Science, where the work centred on auto race, bioinformatics and computational biology.
In physics the decisive move is usually not the theory but the apparatus built to test it.
Like many of his contemporaries, Michael Levitt moved between physics and chemistry without regarding the boundaries as real.
The Israel setting is not incidental. National academies, funding and language decided which findings travelled and which stayed local, in this period as in ours.
Formal recognition came in the shape of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2013) and Fellow of the Royal Society.
The measure that matters is durability. Results that survive re-examination become the floor of a discipline, and it is on that floor that everything afterwards is built.
Michael Levitt is still working, and the final assessment of his contribution has not been made - the ordinary condition of a living scientist.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry — 2013
- Fellow of the Royal Society
- Held posts at Stanford University, University of Cambridge and Weizmann Institute of Science
- Educated at King's College London, Peterhouse and Pretoria Boys High School
- Fields of research: auto race, bioinformatics, computational biology and editing
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