As Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt began a lecture at Georgia Tech this week, he explained that he would not be speaking about his groundbreaking work into multi-scale modeling of macromolecules had it not been for the scientific giants who came before him. 

Levitt’s influences serve as a roll call of “heroes” in the field of computational structural biology.

There’s Linus Pauling, who predicted the alpha-helix in 1951 and whom Levitt describes as the “greatest chemist to ever live.” Two years later, there’s Francis Crick, who predicted the structure of DNA. In 1959, John Kendrew provided the first three-dimensional structure of a protein.

Then there’s Max Perutz, who Levitt labels as “the real hero of structural biology.” An innovator in his own right, Perutz was the doctoral supervisor for both Crick and Kendrew. And finally, there’s David Phillips, an early supporter of computational biology, who unveiled leading research into lysozymes in 1965.

In 1967, Kendrew himself would send Levitt to Israel to start a post-doctoral fellowship with Shneior Lifson at the Weismann Institute and a career in computational structural biology was born.

On Monday, Nov. 24, at the Georgia Tech Student Center Ballroom, Levitt detailed in a lecture titled "Birth and Future of Multi-Scale Modeling of Macromolecules," a career and research that would eventually lead to a professorship at Stanford University and a Nobel Prize.

Levitt is the fourth Nobel Laureate to visit Tech recently at the invitation of the College of Computing, following Aaron Ciechanover and Daniel Shechtman, both prize winners in chemistry, and Kenneth Arrow, a winner for economics. 

To watch Levitt’s lecture, please visit: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/content/nobel-laureate-lecture-michael-levitt