John Kendrew

John Kendrew was an English biochemist and crystallographer who, working at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, determined the complete three-dimensional structure of myoglobin, a protein that stores oxygen inside muscle cells, using X-ray crystallography. Published in 1958, Kendrew's structure of myoglobin was the very first complete three-dimensional structure of any protein ever solved at atomic resolution, revealing the intricate, seemingly irregular folded shape a protein chain actually takes in three dimensions rather than the simpler, more symmetric structures that had previously been solved for smaller molecules. The achievement depended on the same isomorphous replacement technique, using heavy metal atoms to help recover the phase information otherwise lost in X-ray diffraction data, that his colleague Max Perutz had developed while working in parallel on the larger, related protein hemoglobin. Kendrew shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Perutz for their studies of the structures of globular proteins, and beyond his own research he played an important role in the wider development of structural molecular biology as an institution builder, including helping found the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and serving as founding editor of the Journal of Molecular Biology.