At Length with Stever Scher
At Length with Michael Levitt
Prior to his Graduate School Public Lecture, The Birth and Future of Multi-Scale Modeling of Macromolecules, Michael Levitt, professor of structural biology at Stanford University and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, sat down for a conversation with At Length host Steve Scher, ’87.
Recorded on December 4, 2014
Poster from the lecture, The Birth and Future of Multi-Scale Modeling of Macromolecules. Click to enlarge.
Michael Levitt began his theoretical modeling of large chemical systems in 1967 when digital computers had only a fraction of the processing abilities they do today. Now, thanks to the rapid growth of computational power, Levitt has helped bring chemistry into the digital age, helping create complex multi-scale chemical models with a wide range of applications, from the simulation of atomic protein motion to the explanation of enzyme catalysis and protein folding.
In this conversation with Steve Scher, Levitt expands on the staggering possibilities for medical advancement brought about by computing power, the surprising link between video games and microbiology and the extraordinary value of being “kind and good.”
