Michael Levitt


Michael Levitt, is an American-British-Israeli-South African biophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford University, a position he has held since 1987. Levitt received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel, for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".

Early life and education

Michael Levitt was born in Pretoria, South Africa, to a Jewish family from Plungė, Lithuania; his father was from Lithuania and his mother from the Czech Republic. He attended Sunnyside Primary School and then Pretoria Boys High School between 1960 and 1962. The family moved to England when he was 15. Levitt spent 1963 studying applied mathematics at the University of Pretoria. He attended King's College London, graduating with a first-class honours degree in Physics in 1967.
In 1967, he visited Israel for the first time. Together with his Israeli wife, Rina, a multimedia artist, he left to study at Cambridge, where their three children were born. Levitt was a PhD student in Computational biology at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and was based at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology from 1968 to 1972, where he developed a computer program for studying the conformations of molecules that underpinned much of his later work.

Career and research

In 1979, he returned to Israel and conducted research at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, becoming an Israeli citizen in 1980. He served in the Israel Defense Forces for six weeks in 1985. In 1986, he began teaching at Stanford University, and since then has split his time between Israel and California. He went on to gain a research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
From 1980 to 1987, he was Professor of Chemical Physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot. Thereafter, he served as Professor of Structural biology, at Stanford University, California.
Levitt was one of the first researchers to conduct molecular dynamics simulations of DNA and proteins and developed the first software for this purpose. He is currently well known for developing approaches to predict macromolecular structures, having participated in many Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction competitions, where he criticised molecular dynamics for inability to refine protein structures. He has also worked on simplified representations of protein structure for analysing folding and packing, as well as developing scoring systems for large-scale sequence-structure comparisons. He has mentored many successful scientists, including Mark Gerstein and Ram Samudrala. Cyrus Chothia was one of his colleagues.

Industrial collaboration

Levitt has served on the Scientific Advisory Boards of the following companies: Dupont Merck Pharmaceuticals, AMGEN, Protein Design Labs, Affymetrix, Molecular Applications Group, 3D Pharmaceuticals, Algodign, Oplon Ltd, Cocrystal Discovery, InterX, and StemRad, Ltd,.

Covid-19

He has done non-peer reviewed research on Covid-19
In March, he successfully predicted when the rate of increase in the number of deaths in China would slow down. In a Stanford Daily interview during May, Levitt pointed to China, Italy and South Korea as countries that have experienced decreases in cases and deaths, and attributed the decreases to the countries reaching herd immunity at 30%, "You don’t actually have to infect everybody, depending on how fast the virus grows. Some people say 80% , some people say 60%. I personally think it’s less than 30%. And some people are saying we’re never going to get herd immunity. I don’t think so." However, this assertion is problematic, as Levitt's claim fails to account for the mitigation and containment policies taken by all three countries to reduce transmission and prevent deaths. Both China and Italy enacted large scale, and in some regions, draconian lockdowns to slow spread and suppress the number of cases low enough, to the point that test, trace and isolate practices could be enacted to contain it. Meanwhile South Korea moved quickly, early on in the pandemic and enacted an aggressive test, trace and isolate approach to contain the virus before lockdowns were needed. Such mitigation and containment policies were enacted for the specific reason of slowing the spread of the virus and to decrease deaths, therefore, Levitt's claim that case growth and daily deaths decreased as a result of reaching herd immunity is questionable.
He predicted that there would be a slowdown in covid cases
He accurately predicted the initial trajectory of the pandemic, and when China would peak. On the other hand, in March 2020 he made severely wrong predictions that Israel would suffer no more than 10 COVID-19 deaths, as well as that the USA will have a much faster coronavirus recovery than expected. He says that the lockdown saved no lives, and may have cost more lives. He said to Neil Ferguson that there was an overestimation in potential deaths.

Awards and honors

Levitt was elected an EMBO Member in 1983, a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, and received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel, "for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems". He received the DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences in 2014. He was elected an ISCB Fellow by the International Society for Computational Biology in 2015.

Personal life

Levitt holds American, British and Israeli citizenship.
His wife Rina died on 23 January 2017.
He is the sixth Israeli to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in under a decade.