Ex-SA man Levitt among Nobel winners

DAVID SAKS
 

Former South African Michael Levitt, together with fellow Israeli citizen and his former student Arieh Warshel and Austrian-American Martin Karpus, took the number of this year’s Jewish Nobel laureates to six when they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry last week.

They received the prize “for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems”. Pretoria-born Levitt thereby joined Aaron Klug (chemistry), Sydney Brenner (medicine) and Nadine Gordimer (literature) among those Jews of South African origin who have now received the prize.

Levitt and Warshal are also the sixth Israeli citizens to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry in under a decade and the 11th and 12th Israeli recipients in total.

Levitt studied at Kings College, London, and Cambridge University, where he obtained his PhD in computational biology in 1972. Prior to this, he had done post-doctoral work at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, and from 1980 – 1987 he was professor of chemical physics at the Institute. Since then, he has been professor of structural biology at Stanford University, but spends around six months a year in Israel, where his wife and children live.

The other Jewish recipients of this year’s Nobel Prizes are François Baron Englert (physics) and James E Rothman and Randy W Schekman (medicine).

Born in Belgium, Englert survived the Holocaust by concealing his Jewish identity and living in various children’s homes during the Nazi occupation. He shared the prize with Peter Higgs for “the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of the mass of subatomic particles”, which had since been confirmed by subsequent discoveries. 

Americans Rothman (Yale) and Schekman (Berkeley) shared the prize for medicine with German-born Thomas C Südhof for their “discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells”. In doing so, they beat out two strong Israeli contenders, Hebrew University professors Howard Cedar and Aharon Razin, who many had tipped to win for their discoveries regarding DNA methylation and gene expression related to cancer.