BICOM

Two Israeli scientists now based in the United States were named yesterday as recipients of the Nobel Prize for chemistry. Professors Arieh Warshel and Michael Levitt become Israel’s eleventh and twelfth Nobel laureates.

Warshel and Levitt will share the prize with Professor Martin Karpus, an Austrian born chemist who fled to the United States before the Second World War and whose daughter lives in Jerusalem. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced yesterday that “The work of Karplus, Levitt and Warshel is ground-breaking.” Their research, which dates back to the 1970s, but took decades to prove, has helped explain complex chemical systems.

Warshel was born on Kibbutz Sde Nahum and studied at the at the Technion in Haifa and the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot before moving to the United States, where he is now affiliated with the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Levitt grew up in South Africa and studied in Cambridge, gaining British citizenship, before moving to Israel at the age of 35. He lived in Israel and worked at the Weizmann Institute before moving to the United States, where he is now professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He retains a home in Israel, and his sons still live in the country.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Warshel to congratulate him, saying “It is exceptionally impressive, and we are proud of you, proud of people who were at the Technion and the Weizmann Institute.” Meanwhile, President Shimon Peres also spoke with Warshel, saying “I want to congratulate you on behalf of the State of Israel and the Jewish people and every person who hopes to overcome sickness and suffering because of your work.”

Yesterday’s announcement has been greeted with enthusiasm in the Israeli media, and makes an extraordinary eight Israeli Nobel Prize winners in the last 11 years, six of them in chemistry. However, the fact that Warshel and Levitt are based in the United States has fuelled a debate on Israel’s ‘brain drain’. A recent study indicated that the emigration rate of Israeli researchers is the highest in the Western world. The front page headline in this morning’s Israel Hayom is “Nobel Prize is (almost) ours.”