Stanford's chemistry Nobel honours computer science

When he conceived his prestigious prizes in 1895, Alfred Nobel never imagined the need to honour an unknown field called computer science. But the next best thing happened last Wednesday: computing achieved an historic milestone when the Nobel Prize for chemistry went to a trio of researchers for groundbreaking work using computers to model the complex chemistry that sustains life, writes Lisa M Krieger for Inside Bay Area News.

"Computers in biology have not been sufficiently appreciated. Now they have been," said ebullient winner Professor Michael Levitt of Stanford's School of Medicine, the university's second Nobel winner this week. Levitt, a professor of structural biology at Stanford's School of Medicine, shares the $1.25 million Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Professor Martin Karplus of Harvard University and Professor Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California.

At Wednesday morning's news conference at Stanford, Levitt praised computers, not himself. "Biology is very complicated, and computers are powerful tools," he said. The prize, he said, offers belated "recognition of the importance of the computer in biology."
Full report on the Inside Bay Area News site