Martin Karplus

Martin Karplus (German: [ˈmaʁˌtin ˈkaʁplus]; born

March 15, 1930) is an Austrian and American Martin Karplus
theoretical chemist. He is the Director of the
Biophysical Chemistry Laboratory, a joint laboratory
between the French National Center for Scientific
Research and the University of Strasbourg, France. He
is also the Theodore William Richards Professor of
Chemistry, emeritus at Harvard University. Karplus
received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together
with Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, for "the
development of multiscale models for complex
chemical systems".[2][3][4][5][6][7]
Nobel Prize Laureate Martin Karplus during
press conference in Stockholm, December
Early life 2013
Born March 15, 1930
Martin Karplus was born in Vienna, Austria.[8] He was
Vienna, Austria[2]
a child when his family fled from the Nazi-occupation
in Austria a few days after the Anschluss in March Citizenship American, Austrian[2]
1938, spending several months in Zürich, Switzerland Education Harvard University (BA)
and La Baule, France before immigrating to the United California Institute of Technology
States.[9] Prior to their immigration to the United (PhD)
States, the family was known for being "an intellectual
Awards Irving Langmuir Award (1987)
and successful secular Jewish family" in Vienna.[10]
His grandfather, Johann Paul Karplus (1866–1936) Award in Theoretical Chemistry
was a highly acclaimed professor of psychiatry at the (1993)[1]

University of Vienna.[11] His great-aunt, Eugenie ForMemRS (2000)

Goldstern, was an ethnologist who was killed during
Linus Pauling Award (2004)
the Holocaust.[12] He is the nephew, by marriage, of
Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2013)[2]
the sociologist, philosopher and musicologist Theodor
W. Adorno and grandnephew of the physicist Robert Scientific career
von Lieben. His brother, Robert Karplus, was an Institutions Université de Strasbourg[2]
internationally recognized physicist and educator at
Harvard University
University of California, Berkeley. Continuing with the
Columbia University
academic family theme, his nephew, Andrew Karplus,
is a highly respected biochemistry and biophysics University of Illinois at Urbana–
professor at Oregon State University.[13] Champaign

Thesis A quantum-mechanical
discussion of the bifluoride ion (h
Education ttp://codatest2.library.caltech.ed
u/44/) (1954)
After earning an AB degree from Harvard College in Doctoral Linus Pauling[2]
1951,[14] Karplus pursued graduate studies at the advisor
California Institute of Technology. He completed his Website isis.unistra.fr/biophysical-
PhD in 1953[15] under Nobel laureate Linus chemistry-laboratory-martin-
Pauling.[16] According to Pauling, Karplus "was [his] karplus/ (https://isis.unistra.fr/bio
most brilliant student."[17] He was an NSF physical-chemistry-laboratory-m
Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford artin-karplus/)
(1953–55)[15] where he worked with Charles
Coulson.[14]

Teaching career
Karplus taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (1955–60) and then Columbia
University (1960–65) before moving to chemistry faculty at Harvard in 1966.[8][15]

He was a professor at the Louis Pasteur University in 1996 where he established a research group in
Strasbourg, France, after two sabbatical visits between 1992 and 1995 in the NMR laboratory of Jean-
François Lefèvre. He has supervised more than 200 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers over
his career since 1955.[18]

Research
He published his first academic paper when he was 17 years old.[14] Karplus has contributed to many
fields in physical chemistry, including chemical dynamics, quantum chemistry, and most notably,
molecular dynamics simulations of biological macromolecules. He has also been influential in nuclear
magnetic resonance spectroscopy, particularly to the understanding of nuclear spin-spin coupling and
electron spin resonance spectroscopy. The Karplus equation describing the correlation between coupling
constants and dihedral angles in proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy is named after him.

From 1969–1970, Karplus visited the Structural Studies Division at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular
Biology.[19]

In 1970 postdoctoral fellow Arieh Warshel joined Karplus at Harvard. Together they wrote a computer
program that modeled the atomic nuclei and some electrons of a molecule using classical physics and
modeling other electrons using quantum mechanics. In 1974 Karplus, Washel and other collaborators
published a paper based on this type of modeling which successfully modeled the change in shape of
retinal, a large complex protein molecule important to vision.[15]

His current research is concerned primarily with the properties of molecules of biological interest. His
group originated and coordinated the development of the CHARMM program for molecular dynamics
simulations.

Books
Martin Karplus. Spinach on the Ceiling: The Multifaceted Life of a Theoretical Chemist (http
s://doi.org/10.1142/q0238), World Scientific Publishing, UK 2020.
 CL Brooks III, M Karplus, BM Pettitt. Proteins: A Theoretical Perspective of Dynamics,
Structure and Thermodynamics, Volume LXXI, in: Advances in Chemical Physics, John
Wiley & Sons, New York 1988.
Martin Karplus and Richard N. Porter. Atoms and Molecules: An Introduction for Students of
Physical Chemistry. W. A. Benjamin, New York 1970.

Notable students and postdocs

Charles L. Brooks III (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
Axel T. Brünger (Stanford University)
J. Andrew McCammon (UCSD) (w/ Karplus and Gelin) published the first MD simulation of
BPTI (see above publication)
P. T. Narasimhan (University of Illinois) Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar laureate
B. Montgomery Pettitt (University of Texas Medical Branch, Baylor College of Medicine, The
Gulf Coast Consortia (GCC)])
Benoît Roux (University of Chicago)
Andrej Šali (University of California, San Francisco)
Klaus Schulten (University of Illinois)
Jeremy C. Smith (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
David J. States (The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston)
Arieh Warshel (University of Southern California) (co-recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in
Chemistry, along with Karplus and Michael Levitt (Stanford))
Eugene Shakhnovich, Professor at Harvard University [20]
Alexander D. MacKerell, Jr. (University of Maryland, Baltimore)

Awards and honours

Karplus was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1967.[21] He was awarded the
Irving Langmuir Award in 1987.[22] He is a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular
Science. He became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991[23]
and was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2000. He is a recipient of the
Christian B. Anfinsen Award, given in 2001. He was awarded the Linus Pauling Award in 2004 and the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2013.[2]

Personal life
Karplus is married to Marci[14] and has three children.[8]

See also
List of Jewish Nobel laureates

References
 1. Jain, Chelsi. "Awards List extended using a reliable source" (https://www.chemistry.msu.ed
u/faculty-research/portraits/karplus-martin.aspx).
2. "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013" (https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/lau
reates/2013/press.html) (Press release). Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. October 9,
2013. Retrieved October 9, 2013.
3. Chang, Kenneth (October 9, 2013). "3 Researchers Win Nobel Prize in Chemistry" (https://w
ww.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/science/three-researchers-win-nobel-prize-in-chemistry.html).
New York Times. Retrieved October 9, 2013.
4. Fersht, A. R. (2013). "Profile of Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt, and Arieh Warshel, 2013
nobel laureates in chemistry" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3856823).
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 110 (49):
19656–7. Bibcode:2013PNAS..11019656F (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013PNAS..1
1019656F). doi:10.1073/pnas.1320569110 (https://doi.org/10.1073%2Fpnas.1320569110).
PMC 3856823 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3856823). PMID 24277833
(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24277833).
5. Hodak, Hélène (2014). "The Nobel Prize in chemistry 2013 for the development of
multiscale models of complex chemical systems: A tribute to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt
and Arieh Warshel" (https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.jmb.2013.10.037). Journal of Molecular
Biology. 426 (1): 1–3. doi:10.1016/j.jmb.2013.10.037 (https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.jmb.2013.
10.037). PMID 24184197 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24184197).
6. Van Noorden, R. (2013). "Computer modellers secure chemistry Nobels". Nature.
doi:10.1038/nature.2013.13903 (https://doi.org/10.1038%2Fnature.2013.13903).
S2CID 211729791 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:211729791).
7. Van Noorden, Richard (2013). "Modellers react to chemistry award: Nobel Prize proves that
theorists can measure up to experimenters" (https://doi.org/10.1038%2F502280a). Nature.
502 (7471): 280. Bibcode:2013Natur.502..280V (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013Nat
ur.502..280V). doi:10.1038/502280a (https://doi.org/10.1038%2F502280a). PMID 24132265
(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24132265).
8. "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013" (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2013/karp
lus/facts/). NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 2021-01-18.
9. Karplus, M (2006). "Spinach on the ceiling: a theoretical chemist's return to biology". Annual
Review of Biophysics and Biomolecular Structure. 35: 1–47.
doi:10.1146/annurev.biophys.33.110502.133350 (https://doi.org/10.1146%2Fannurev.biophy
s.33.110502.133350). PMID 16689626 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16689626).
10. Fuller, Robert (2002). A Love of Discovery: Science Education – The Second Career of
Robert Karplus. New York: Kluwer Academic. p. 293. ISBN 0-306-46687-2.
11. Gaugusch, Georg (2011). Wer einmal war: Das jüdische Großbürgertum Wiens 1800–1938
A-K (http://www.jewishfamilies.at/index.html). Wien: Amalthea Signum. pp. 1358–1367.
ISBN 978-3850027502.
12. Ireland, Corydon (June 3, 2015). "Karplus on film" (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2
015/06/karplus-on-film/). The Harvard Gazette. Retrieved 26 March 2019.
13. Splichalova, Dacotah-Victoria. "Diamond in the rough: Karplus wins lifetime achievement
award" (http://www.orangemedianetwork.com/daily_barometer/news/diamond-in-the-rough-k
arplus-wins-lifetime-achievement-award/article_08a9060e-2281-51f1-9671-846be904b488.h
tml). Orange Media Network. Retrieved 2020-04-24.
14. "Harvard's Martin Karplus looks back on path to Nobel Prize" (https://news.harvard.edu/gaz
ette/story/2017/04/harvards-martin-karplus-looks-back-on-path-to-nobel-prize/). Harvard
Gazette. 2017-04-21. Retrieved 2021-01-18.
15. "Martin Karplus | American-Austrian chemist" (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Martin-
Karplus). Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2021-01-18.
16. Karplus, Martin (1954). A quantum-mechanical discussion of the bifluoride ion (https://web.a
rchive.org/web/20150518081923/http://codatest2.library.caltech.edu/44/) (PhD thesis).
California Institute of Technology. Archived from the original (http://codatest2.library.caltech.
edu/44/) on 2015-05-18. Retrieved 2015-05-08.
17. "Harvard professor wins Nobel in chemistry" (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/1
0/harvard-professor-wins-nobel-in-chemistry/). October 9, 2013.
18. "Martin Karplus – www.americanbiophysicists.com" (http://americanbiophysicists.com/martin
-karplus/). Retrieved 2021-01-18.
19. pmabbs (2013-10-09). "LMB Alumni awarded Nobel Prize for Chemistry, 2013" (https://www
2.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/lmb-alumni-awarded-nobel-prize-for-chemistry-2013/). MRC
Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
20. Martin Karplus, Spinach on the Ceiling: A Theoretical Chemist’s Return to Biology. Annu.
Rev. Biophys. Biomol. Struct. 2006. 35:1–47
21. "Martin Karplus" (http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/members/53964.html).
www.nasonline.org.
22. "Irving Langmuir Award in Chemical Physics" (https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/funding-a
nd-awards/awards/national/bytopic/irving-langmuir-award-in-chemical-physics.html).
American Chemical Society. Retrieved 2021-08-19.
23. "M. Karplus" (https://web.archive.org/web/20190326155224/https://www.knaw.nl/en/member
s/foreign-members/4342). Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived from
the original (https://www.knaw.nl/en/members/foreign-members/4342) on 26 March 2019.
Retrieved 19 July 2015.

External links
Martin Karplus (https://www.nobelprize.org/laureate/889) on Nobelprize.org – including the
Nobel Lecture on 8 December 2013 Development of Multiscale Models for Complex
Chemical Systems From H+H2 to Biomolecules
Publications (http://mir.harvard.edu/group/karplus/pub.html)
Karplus research group at Harvard University (http://chemistry.harvard.edu/people/martin-ka
rplus)
Biophysical Chemistry Laboratory at University of Strasbourg (http://www-isis.u-strasbg.fr/bi
op/start) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20141018062538/http://www-isis.u-strasbg.f
r/biop/start) 2014-10-18 at the Wayback Machine
Biography at Michigan State University website (https://web.archive.org/web/200609070016
21/http://www.chemistry.msu.edu/Lectureships/lectures.asp?series=MTR&Year=1995)
Martin Karplus photography website (http://www.mkarplusphotographer.com/)
Martin Karplus's autobiography Spinach on the Ceiling: The Multifaceted Life of a
Theoretical Chemist (https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/q0238)
Meet the Author: Martin Karplus, book launch of Spinach on the Ceiling: The Multifaceted
Life of a Theoretical Chemist (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI96Z99eLdQ)

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