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The birth of computational structural biology

Nature Structural Biology volume 8, pages 392–393 (2001)Cite this article

Like Sydney Altman1, I too was initially rejected by the renowned Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. The year was 1967 and I was then in my final year of a B.Sc. degree in Physics at Kings College in London. Enthralled by John Kendrew's BBC 1964 television series “The Thread of Life”, I wanted desperately to do my Ph.D. at the MRC in Cambridge. Alas there was no room for any new postgraduate students in 1967!

After some negotiations, I was accepted for the following year. More importantly, John Kendrew said that I should spend the intervening period at the Weizmann Institute in Israel with Shneior Lifson. Kendrew had just heard of Lifson's initial ideas2 on the consistent force field (CFF), which was an attempt to simulate the properties of any molecular system from a simple potential energy function. He believed that these methods should be applied to protein and nucleic acid macromolecules. I arrived in Israel in October, 1967 and set to work programming the consistent force field under the supervision of Lifson and his Ph.D. student Arieh Warshel. At that time, computing at the Weizmann Institute was amongst the best in the world; in 1963 computer engineers there had built their own machine, appropriately known as the Golem, after the Jewish folklore automaton.

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Figure 1: The total potential energy of any molecule is the sum of simple allowing for bond stretching, bond angle bending, bond twisting, van der Waals interactions and electrostatics.

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  1. the Department of Structural Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, 94305-5400, Calfornia, USA

    Michael Levitt

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Levitt, M. The birth of computational structural biology. Nat Struct Mol Biol 8, 392–393 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/87545

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