Martin Karplus was born in Vienna, Austria.[8] He was a child when his family fled from the Nazi-occupation in Austria a few days after the Anschluss in March 1938, spending several months in Zürich, Switzerland and La Baule, France before immigrating to the United States.[9] Prior to their immigration to the United States, the family was known for being "an intellectual and successful secular Jewish family" in Vienna.[10] His grandfather, Johann Paul Karplus (1866–1936) was a highly acclaimed professor of psychiatry at the University of Vienna.[11] His great-aunt, Eugenie Goldstern, was an ethnologist who was killed during the Holocaust.[12] He was the nephew, by marriage, of the sociologist, philosopher and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno and grandnephew of the physicist Robert von Lieben. His brother, Robert Karplus, was an internationally recognized physicist and educator at University of California, Berkeley. Continuing with the academic family theme, his nephew, Andrew Karplus, is a biochemistry and biophysics professor at Oregon State University.[13]
He was a professor at the Louis Pasteur University in 1996 where he established a research group in Strasbourg, France, after two sabbatical visits between 1992 and 1995 in the NMR laboratory of Jean-François Lefèvre. He has supervised more than 200 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers over his career since 1955.[18]
Personal life and death
Karplus was married to Marci[14] and had three children.[8] He died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 28, 2024, at the age of 94.[19][20]
In 1970 postdoctoral fellow Arieh Warshel joined Karplus at Harvard. Together they wrote a computer program that modeled the atomic nuclei and some electrons of a molecule using classical physics and modeling other electrons using quantum mechanics. In 1974 Karplus, Washel and other collaborators published a paper based on this type of modeling which successfully modeled the change in shape of retinal, a large complex protein molecule important to vision.[15]
His research was concerned primarily with the properties of molecules of biological interest. His group originated and coordinated the development of the CHARMM program for molecular dynamics simulations.[23]
Books
Karplus, Martin (2020). Spinach on the Ceiling: The Multifaceted Life of a Theoretical Chemist. WORLD SCIENTIFIC (EUROPE). doi:10.1142/q0238. ISBN978-1-78634-802-9.
Brooks, Charles L.; Karplus, Martin; Pettitt, B. Montgomery (November 16, 1988). Advances in Chemical Physics, Volume 71. New York: Wiley-Interscience. ISBN978-0-471-62801-9.
Karplus, Martin; Porter, Richard N. (1970). Atoms and Molecules: An Introduction for Students of Physical Chemistry. New York: W. A. Benjamin. ISBN978-0-8053-5218-4.
^"Martin Karplus". Department of Chemistry, Michigan State University. May 13, 2024. Archived from the original on July 22, 2024. Retrieved January 3, 2025.
^Fuller, Robert (2002). A Love of Discovery: Science Education – The Second Career of Robert Karplus. New York: Kluwer Academic. p. 293. ISBN978-0-306-46687-8.
Martin Karplus on Nobelprize.org – including the Nobel Lecture on December 8, 2013 Development of Multiscale Models for Complex Chemical Systems From H+H2 to Biomolecules