Harvard’s Martin Karplus looks back on path to Nobel Prize
Life stories from Steven Pinker, Helen Vendler, E.O. Wilson, and many more, in the Experience series. Martin Karplus ’50 is Harvard’s Theodore Williams Richards Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus. In 2013 he shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry with two colleagues. He maintains that the only real chemistry he does is in the kitchen. Karplus, 87, is at work on a memoir. The book will tell a story that moves from a sunny boyhood in Vienna (he was born in 1930, the scion of an accomplished Jewish family), through the dark woods of the Nazi era (in 1938, the Karplus family fled Hitler’s Europe, and wound up in suburban Boston), and then into the sun again, when Karplus discovered science in earnest. He published his first academic paper at age 17; earned early recognition at the California Institute of Technology as a protégé of two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, who called him “my...