Michael Levitt
Michael Levitt | |
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Born | [11] Pretoria, South Africa | 9 May 1947
Citizenship | |
Education | Pretoria Boys High School |
Alma mater | King's College London (BScs) University of Cambridge (PhD) |
Spouse | Shoshan Brosh[citation needed] |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions |
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Thesis | Conformation analysis of proteins (1972) |
Doctoral advisor | Robert Diamond[5][6] |
Notable students | |
Website | med |
Michael Levitt,
Early life and education
Michael Levitt was born in
In 1967, he visited Israel for the first time. Together with his Israeli wife, Rina,
Career and research
In 1979, he returned to Israel and conducted research at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, becoming an Israeli citizen in 1980. He served in the Israel Defense Forces for six weeks in 1985. In 1986, he began teaching at Stanford University, and since then has split his time between Israel and California.[23] He went on to gain a research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
From 1980 to 1987, he was Professor of Chemical Physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot. Thereafter, he served as Professor of Structural biology, at Stanford University, California.
- Royal Society Exchange Fellow, Weizmann Institute, Israel, 1967–68[29]
- Staff Scientist, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, 1973–80
- Professor of Chemical Physics, Weizmann Institute, 1980–87 (dept. chair 1980–83)
- Professor of Structural Biology, Stanford University, 1987–present
Levitt was one of the first researchers to conduct
was one of his colleagues.Industrial collaboration
Levitt has served on the Scientific Advisory Boards of the following companies: Dupont Merck Pharmaceuticals, AMGEN, Protein Design Labs, Affymetrix, Molecular Applications Group, 3D Pharmaceuticals, Algodign, Oplon Ltd, Cocrystal Discovery, InterX, and StemRad, Ltd,.[citation needed]
COVID-19
Levitt has been outspoken during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and made a number of predictions on the disease's spread based on his own modelling.[42][43][44] On March 18, 2020, he predicted that Israel would see less than ten deaths from COVID-19, and on July 25, 2020, he incorrectly predicted that the outbreak in the U.S. would be over by the end of August 2020 with a total of fewer than 170,000 deaths.[45][42][46] As of November 2021, the U.S. was recording COVID-19 deaths at the rate of about 1,000 per day,[47] while Israel has reported over 8,000 COVID-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic.[48] However also in March 2020, when community spread of COVID-19 had dropped to zero in China, the Los Angeles Times reported that Levitt was “remarkably accurate” and had correctly forecast a month earlier that the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country would be over long before when many health experts had predicted.[44]
Levitt has also raised concerns about potential damaging effects of COVID-19 lockdown orders on economic activity as well in increasing suicide and abuse rates,[43] and has signed the Great Barrington Declaration,[49] a statement supported by a group of academics advocating for alternatives to lockdowns which has been criticized by the WHO and other public health organizations as dangerous and lacking in sound scientific basis.[50][51]
Critics have expressed concern regarding Levitt's incorrect or potentially misleading predictions as well as his anti-lockdown positions, in part due to his status as a Nobel laureate and his large following on Twitter.[42][52] Maia Majumder, a computational epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, stated that "Michael Levitt has a huge, huge following, so this creates lots of problems when he’s tweeting something that may be misinformative."[42] Randy Schekman, a 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine winner, wrote of Levitt's expressed positions that "in this instance, I believe he crossed a boundary from data to public policy where the impact of his word as a Nobel laureate has undue influence."[42]
Awards and honors
Levitt was elected an
Personal life
Levitt holds South African, American, British and Israeli citizenship.
His wife Rina died on 23 January 2017.
He is the sixth Israeli to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in under a decade.[57][58]
See also
References
- ^ a b Anon (1983). "Michael Levitt EMBO profile". people.embo.org. Heidelberg: European Molecular Biology Organization.
- ^ a b Anon (2017). "ISCB Fellows". iscb.org. International Society for Computational Biology. Archived from the original on 20 March 2017.
- S2CID 6519868.
- ^ a b Michael Levitt publications indexed by Google Scholar
- ^ EThOS uk.bl.ethos.463153.
- PMID 5144255.
- S2CID 2341877.
- PMID 9342336.
- PMID 23078280.
- PMID 10864507.
- ^ doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U42816. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
- ^ a b c d Siegel-Itzkovich, Judy (9 October 2013). "Two American Israelis and US jew share Nobel Prize in Chemistry". The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved 12 November 2017.
- ^ a b Anon (2001). "Professor Michael Levitt FRS". London: Royalsociety.org. Archived from the original on 17 November 2015. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
"All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." --"Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 11 November 2016. Retrieved 9 March 2016.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) - ^ "Levitt Lab Server | Computational Structural Biology". Csb.stanford.edu. Archived from the original on 25 March 2016. Retrieved 22 March 2017.
- ^ "Michael Levitt". Csb.stanford.edu\accessdate=2017-03-22. Archived from the original on 15 July 2010.
- PMID 24132265.
- S2CID 211729791.
- ^ "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013" (PDF) (Press release). Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. 9 October 2013. Retrieved 9 October 2013.
- ^ Chang, Kenneth (9 October 2013). "3 Researchers Win Nobel Prize in Chemistry". The New York Times. Retrieved 9 October 2013.
- ^ "Michael Levitt – Facts". Nobelprize.org. 9 May 1947. Retrieved 22 March 2017.
- .
- ^ "Foreign Minister congratulates Litvak Levitt on winning Nobel PrizeThe Lithuania Tribune". en.delfi.lt. Archived from the original on 13 October 2013. Retrieved 2 February 2022.
- ^ a b Ravidyesterday, Barak (10 October 2013). "Nobel laureate Michael Levitt tells Haaretz: 'I still feel 16, so I have no ego' – World". Haaretz. Retrieved 22 March 2017.
- ^ "News > University of Pretoria". Archived from the original on 1 November 2013. Retrieved 30 October 2013.
- ^ "King's College London Calendar: 1968–1969 Page 282". King's Collections. Retrieved 12 September 2017.
- ^ "Michael Levitt 2 Page CV". Csb.stanford.edu. Archived from the original on 22 March 2012. Retrieved 22 March 2017.
- ^ "Michael Levitt – Photo Gallery". Nobelprize.org. Retrieved 22 March 2017.
- ^ "Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Peterhouse alumnus". University of Cambridge. 10 October 2013. Retrieved 11 October 2013.
- ^ Fiske, Gavriel (9 October 2013). "3 Jewish professors – two of them Israeli – share 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry". The Times of Israel. Retrieved 12 November 2017.
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- ^ Michael Levitt publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
- ^ a b c d e Boodman, Eric (24 May 2021). "He's a Stanford professor and a Nobel laureate. Critics say he was dangerously misleading on Covid". Stat. Retrieved 13 September 2021.
- ^ a b Lloyd, Zenobia. "Q&A: Michael Levitt on why there shouldn't be a lockdown, how he's been tracking coronavirus". Stanford Daily. Retrieved 18 December 2021.
- ^ a b "Why this Nobel laureate predicts a quicker coronavirus recovery: 'We're going to be fine'". Los Angeles Times.
- ^ Levitt, Michael. "US Covid19 will be d one in 4 weeks". Twitter.
- ^ "Prof Michael Levitt: here's what I got wrong – The Post". UnHerd. Retrieved 11 October 2020.
- ^ Bosman, Julie; Harmon, Amy; Sun, Albert; Reynolds, Chloe; Cahalan, Sarah (15 December 2021). "Covid deaths in the United States surpass 800,000". The New York Times. Retrieved 15 December 2021.
- ^ Krauss, Joseph (26 November 2021). "Israel warns of 'emergency' after detecting new virus strain". ABC.
- ^ Young, Robin. "Herd Immunity Is 'Pixie Dust Thinking,' Infectious Disease Expert Says". WBUR. Retrieved 18 December 2021.
- ^ Hellmann, Jessie (15 October 2020). "Dozens of public health groups, experts blast 'herd immunity' strategy backed by White House". The Hill. Retrieved 18 October 2020.
- ^ Staff and agencies in Geneva (12 October 2020). "WHO chief says herd immunity approach to pandemic 'unethical'". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 October 2020.
- ^ Samuel, Fishwick (13 October 2020). "'I've had emails calling me evil'... Meet the Covid scientists at war". Evening Standard.
- ^ "Michael Levitt". Member Directory. National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved 6 November 2016.
- ^ "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013" (PDF). Nobelprize.org. Retrieved 22 March 2017.
- ^ "2014 ASBMB Annual Awards: DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences". Asbmb.org. Archived from the original on 22 January 2015. Retrieved 22 January 2015.
- ^ "Feb 20, 2015: Meet the ISCB Fellows Class of 2015". Iscb.org. Archived from the original on 20 February 2015. Retrieved 22 March 2017.
- ^ Pileggi, Tamar (9 October 2013). "Tiny Israel a Nobel heavyweight, especially in chemistry". The Times of Israel. Retrieved 22 March 2017.
- ^ Solomon, Shoshanna. "Israelis lose out to US-German trio for Nobel medicine prize". The Times of Israel. Retrieved 22 March 2017.
This article incorporates text available under the CC BY 4.0 license.
External links
- Michael Levitt on Nobelprize.org