Max Perutz

Max Perutz was an Austrian-born British molecular biologist and crystallographer who spent more than two decades working out the three-dimensional structure of hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells responsible for carrying oxygen through the body, using the technique of X-ray crystallography. Solving the structure of a molecule as large and complex as a protein by X-ray methods had seemed close to impossible for many years because of what crystallographers call the phase problem, the loss of certain critical information when X-rays are recorded as a diffraction pattern, and Perutz's eventual solution, a technique called isomorphous replacement using heavy metal atoms attached at specific points on the protein, became a foundational method that made solving other protein structures by X-ray crystallography practically possible for the first time. Perutz shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with his colleague John Kendrew, who used the same general approach to solve the related, smaller protein myoglobin, for their studies of the structures of globular proteins. Perutz founded and for many years directed the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, an institution that went on to host or train an extraordinary concentration of future Nobel laureates and became one of the most influential centers for structural molecular biology in the world.