Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to Karplus, Levitt and Warshel

Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry on Wednesday "for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems."

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the scientists' research in the 1970s helped develop programs which unveil chemical processes such as the purification of exhaust fumes or photosynthesis in green leaves.

"The work of Karplus, Levitt and Warshel is ground-breaking in that they managed to make Newton's classical physics work side-by-side with the fundamentally different quantum physics," the academy said.

Karplus, an American and Austrian citizen, is affiliated with the Universite de Strasbourg in France and Harvard University.

Levitt, an American, British and Israeli citizen, is professor of cancer research at Stanford.

And Warshel, an American and Israeli citizen, is a distinguished professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

The scientists were awarded with the prize of 8 million crowns ($1.25 million).

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists in the various fields of chemistry.

The Prize has been awarded 105 times to 166 Nobel Laureates between 1901 and 2013.

The first Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in 1901 to Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff, of the Netherlands, "for his discovery of the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions."

Frederick Sanger is the only Nobel Laureate who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice, in 1958 and 1980.

The winners of Nobel Prize in Chemistry since 2001:

2001: William Knowles (US), Ryoji Noyori (Japan), Barry Sharpless (US)

2002: John Fenn (US), Koichi Tanaka (Japan) and Kurt Wüthrich (Switzerland)

2003: Peter Agre (US), Roderick MacKinnon (US)

2004: Aaron Ciechanover (Israel), Avram Hershko (İsrail), Irwin Rose (US)

2005: Yves Chauvin (France), Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock (US)

2006: Roger D. Kornberg (US)

2007: Gerhard Ertl (Germany)

2008: Roger Tsien US), Martin Chalfie (US) and Osamu Shimomura (Japan)

2009: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitzile (US) and Ada Yonath (Israel)

2010 :Richard Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi (US) and Akira Suzuki (Japan)