Michael Levitt, 66, a Stanford biologist known on the campus as a "computer hacker," was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for his pioneering work using the power of computers to create models in three dimensions of the fundamental chemical reactions essential to life.

He will share the $1.2 million Nobel award with Martin Karplus of Harvard and Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California, two biologists who worked toward similar goals: to harness computers to reveal the structure of the body's smallest molecules that function together - or that often malfunction - in the human body.

Those models, created by uniting chemistry and quantum physics, have proved vital for today's progress toward a deeper understanding of human disease and for revealing just how drugs couple with protein molecules in the body - an essential linkage for scientists seeking new medicines to combat old diseases.

Their work, begun in the early 1970s, has changed the way chemists do their fundamental experiments. Where scientists trying to understand the complexity of chemical reactions once had to depend on test tubes and Tinkertoy models, today the interaction of millions of atoms in those chemicals can be simulated on high-powered computers.

Levitt is the school's 30th faculty member or Hoover Institution fellow to be awarded a Nobel Prize and the second this week. On Monday, Dr. Thomas Sudhof, professor of molecular and cellular physiology, won the Nobel Prize in medicine for work demonstrating how nerve cells communicate within the brain and for exploring how they fail neurological diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Born in South Africa, Levitt earned his doctorate from Cambridge University in England and did postgraduate research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He holds citizenship in all three countries: America, Britain and Israel.

His Israeli-born wife, Rina, is an artist, and the couple have three children.

Rina Levitt sat in the audience Wednesday during her husband's Stanford news conference, and burst into laughter when he spoke of his late-night work by saying, "It's like having two wives. I'm pretty good at computers, but not so good at wives. I'm a very passionate scientist, but a very bad husband."

Levitt said he is continually impressed by the power of the computers he uses in his daily work.

"Computers and biology go together," he said. "Biology is very complicated, and computers are such wonderful, powerful tools. And they just keep getting more and more powerful."

All three winners announced Wednesday are longtime colleagues, and Levitt, with a bachelor's degree in physics and a doctorate in computational biology, was a computer programmer working with Warshel at Israel's Weizmann Institute in the early 1970's.

Their work has connected them over many years, for although classical chemistry experiments can reveal how large chemical molecules in the human body interact with each other, the smaller molecules - like those inside proteins - require computer programs to explore the complex techniques of quantum physics.

It was his ability to combine quantum physicist with computer sciences that has earned Levitt distinction among his colleagues for decades.