Max Ferdinand Perutz, OM (May 19, 1914 – February 6, 2002) was an Austrian-British
molecular biologist.
He was born in Vienna in 1914. In 1936 he became a research student at the
Cavendish Laboratory in a crystallography group directed by J. Bernal, and
remained in Cambridge subsequently.
During World War II, he was asked to find a way to improve the structural
qualities of ice for Project Habakkuk (a secret project to build an aircraft
carrier made of ice) and investigated the recently invented mixture of ice and
woodpulp known as pykrete.
In 1953 Perutz showed that the diffracted xrays from protein crystals could be
phased by comparing the patterns from crystals of the protein with and without
heavy atoms attached. In 1959 he determined the molecular structure of the
protein hemoglobin, which transports oxygen in the blood, using this method. In
1962 he received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, with John Kendrew.
He established the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, England in
1962 and was chairman until 1979. He remained active in research to the end of
his life. From the mid-1980s on he was a regular reviewer/essayist for The New
York Review of Books on biomedical subjects.
His son Robin Perutz is a professor of chemistry at the University of York in
England.
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