Max Perutz

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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.

Books

• Is Science Necessary: Essays on Science and Scientists
• I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier: Essays on Science, Science, Scientists, and Humanity
• Proteins and nucleic acids: structure and function.
• Science is Not a Quiet Life: Unravelling the Atomic Mechanism of Haemoglobin
• Glutamine Repeats and Neurodegenerative Diseases: Molecular Aspects
• Protein Structure: A User's Guide
• Le molecole dei viventi. Di Renzo Editore, Roma, 1998,

External links

• [Biography by his colleagues at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology]
• [Freeview online video interview with Max Perutz provided by the Vega Science Trust (Approx 40 mins long)]
• [Max Perutz's CV at the MRC Lab]
• [Publications of Max Perutz]
• [Nobel website biography]
• [PhysicsWeb Max Perutz biographical article]
• [Lawrence Bragg]
• [Bragg and the founding of MRC Laboratory OF Molecular Biology]
• [Max F. Perutz Laboratories (Universtity of Vienna & Medical University of Vienna)]

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