- Person
- Max Perutz
- Lived
- 1914–2002
- Field
- Molecular biology
- From
- Austrian-British
The story
Max Perutz arrived in Cambridge from Vienna in 1936 to work in J. D. Bernal's crystallography group at the Cavendish Laboratory. In 1937 a conversation in Prague with his cousin, the biochemist Felix Haurowitz, set him on the problem of haemoglobin, and when Lawrence Bragg became Cavendish professor in 1938 he became Perutz's strongest supporter. The war interrupted the work, but after 1945 many scientists trained in physics were turning to biology, bringing new methods and a new way of thinking with them.
In 1947 the Medical Research Council, guided by its secretary Edward Mellanby, agreed with Bragg's backing to support a unit for the study of the molecular structure of biological systems. In October of that year Perutz was made its head. Its entire staff besides him was John Kendrew, who had joined him to study myoglobin, a smaller cousin of haemoglobin.
The group grew slowly at first, to four people in 1950. Hugh Huxley came to study muscle, Francis Crick joined at the end of the 1940s, and the young American James Watson arrived in 1951. They worked in cramped quarters inside the Cavendish: a single-storey temporary building known as the Hut, a few rooms and a glass-fronted lean-to called the Greenhouse.
In 1953 this tiny unit had an extraordinary year. Watson and Crick built their model of the double helix of DNA. Perutz showed that attaching heavy atoms to protein crystals could reveal their structures, the method that led him and Kendrew to the first protein structures. Huxley discovered that muscles contract by filaments sliding past each other. In 1957, when it was renamed the MRC Unit for Molecular Biology, Vernon Ingram showed there that sickle cell anaemia is caused by a single amino acid change in haemoglobin, and by 1961 Sydney Brenner and Crick had helped discover messenger RNA and shown that the genetic code is read in triplets.
By 1960 the group had about 40 members. Its success persuaded the Medical Research Council to build a much larger Laboratory of Molecular Biology on the outskirts of Cambridge, which the unit moved into in early 1962 with Perutz as chairman. That same year Perutz and Kendrew shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Crick and Watson a share of the prize for medicine.
Why it matters
The unit Perutz founded was the cradle of molecular biology, the science behind modern genetics and biotechnology.
About Max Perutz
Viennese refugee who spent 22 years solving the structure of haemoglobin, won the 1962 Nobel Prize and built the Cambridge laboratory where molecular biology came of age.
More about Max Perutz
- Max Perutz was also a pioneering glacier scientistIn 1938 Max Perutz joined a three-man expedition to study how snow becomes glacier ice in Switzerland, work that made him an expert on glaciers.
- Perutz explained how haemoglobin delivers oxygenIn 1970 Max Perutz proposed how haemoglobin works as a molecular machine, switching shape to pick up oxygen in the lungs and release it in the tissues.
- Perutz linked haemoglobin's shape to inherited diseaseMax Perutz studied how changes in haemoglobin's amino acids alter its function, hoping to find drugs for genetic blood disorders such as sickle cell anaemia.
- Max Perutz found the key to seeing protein structuresIn 1953 Max Perutz showed that attaching heavy atoms such as mercury to protein crystals solves the X-ray 'phase problem', making protein crystallography possible.
- In his eighties, Perutz took on Huntington's diseaseIn his final years Max Perutz studied Huntington's disease, showing that its age of onset is linked to the number of glutamine repeats, which form a 'polar zipper'.
- Perutz led a lab whose scientists shared 12 Nobel PrizesMax Perutz founded and chaired the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge from 1962 to 1979; its scientists have shared 12 Nobel Prizes.
- Max Perutz revealed the structure of haemoglobinIn 1959, 22 years after he began, Max Perutz determined the structure of haemoglobin, the blood's oxygen carrier, sharing the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Sources
- Max Perutz Wikipedia
- Max Perutz American Crystallographic Association history
- Max F. Perutz: Biographical Nobel Prize
- MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.