Forty is the new 20 when it comes to science funding — but that's not a good thing.
Speaking to an audience of promising young scientists under 35 at the 68th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings in Germany this week, Pretoria-born Professor Michael Levitt said the chances for a researcher under 35 getting funding had halved since 1980, while a 60-year-old's chances had doubled.
"I think we are doing a lot of damage to our science by not supporting younger people. It's not an accident that the great advances of the [last] century were done by people who dropped out of university: [Steve] Jobs, [Bill] Gates," he said.
The Lindau gatherings, which have been held in the German town on the shore of Lake Constance since 1951, provide an opportunity for Nobel prize winners in scientific fields to engage with young scientists. This year, 39 Nobel laureates and 600 young scientists from 84 countries attended.
Levitt's path from Pretoria schoolboy to Nobel prize winner was paved with luck, he said.
"How do you win a Nobel prize? You need to be lucky. How do you get lucky? One way is to try to have lots of alternatives. Try to keep things open, because you don't know where luck is going to strike."
Sitting across from the 71-year-old, you can still see the charming Casanova who, at Pretoria Boys High School in the early 1960s, was "much more interested in girls than anything I saw in school".After he stayed out one night playing snooker at a "dodgy" hotel in Pretoria until 2am, his mother forced him to skip two years of school and go to university at 15.
He studied applied mathematics at the University of Pretoria for a year before going to visit his uncle and aunt, both scientists, in London.
He decided to stay to study biophysics. It was 1963 and he was 16.
When he wanted to study further at Cambridge, the university insisted he first go to Israel for a year to work with a scientist. This set him on the path that eventually earned him the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2013 for developing a computer program to calculate and simulate complex chemical reactions."It was all set up for me. All I had to do was not say: 'No, no, no, my plan was this and this and I'm not going to agree,'" he said.
Now based at Stanford University in the US, Levitt said education needed to be South Africa's No1 priority.
"One thing that shocked me was that when I was at Rhodes University they said their best students were from Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has had its own political problems, yet the school system there is considered better than the one in South Africa."
Levitt's life took one more unexpected turn when his wife of nearly 50 years, Rina, died in January last year after a stroke. Although he felt he was "half a person", six months later he met Shoshan, an Israeli woman, online.
"It shocked me, because finding a relationship when you're 70 ... I mean, do you even hold hands any more? She's in her 60s. We each had previous lives."
On walks in Lindau, the two were spotted taking selfies like excited teenagers.
"Age is actually irrelevant. I feel like I'm 18. I'm just turned on by life. The world's a pretty good place."..