- Person
- Max Perutz
- Lived
- 1914–2002
- Field
- Molecular biology
- From
- Austrian-British
The story
Max Perutz grew up in Vienna and had skied and climbed mountains since childhood. In 1936 he came to Cambridge as a research student in crystallography, and soon afterwards began his lifelong study of haemoglobin. Then, in 1938, Hitler took over Austria. His parents escaped to Switzerland but lost all their money, and with it went the support that had paid for his studies.
That summer Perutz found a way to combine his passions. With his skiing ability, his mountaineering experience and his knowledge of crystals, he was accepted as a member of a three-man team studying how snow turns into ice in Swiss glaciers. The fieldwork took him to the high-altitude research station on the Jungfraujoch, where he examined how the snowflakes that fall on a glacier are transformed into the huge single ice crystals that make up its bulk, and how the mechanical properties of ice measured in the laboratory relate to the way glaciers flow.
His paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society made him known as an expert on glaciers. That expertise soon had unexpected uses. During the war he was asked whether commandos landed in Norway could hide in shelters under glaciers, and in 1942 he was recruited to Project Habakkuk, a secret plan to build a floating airfield of ice in the mid-Atlantic. He experimented with pykrete, a new mixture of ice and wood pulp, in a secret location beneath Smithfield Meat Market in London.
After the war he returned briefly to glaciology, and on a 1948 field trip he worked on the mechanism of glacier flow, demonstrating how glaciers move. He later admitted that the glacier work was mainly an excuse to spend time in the mountains. Yet it earned lasting recognition: the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey named the Perutz Glacier on the coast of Graham Land in Antarctica after him for his studies of how glaciers flow.
In 2019 his son Robin, a chemistry professor at the University of York, gave a lecture tracing how his father's expeditions had shaped scientific understanding of glaciers, after the Jungfraujoch station was named a chemical landmark. The American Crystallographic Association's account of Perutz's life still lists the glacier studies among his contributions to science.
Why it matters
Perutz's glacier studies helped explain how snow becomes glacier ice and how glaciers flow, and an Antarctic glacier bears his name.
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 founded the unit where DNA's shape was foundIn 1947 Max Perutz obtained Medical Research Council support for a small unit to study biological molecules; Watson and Crick built their DNA model there in 1953.
- 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
- The Jungfraujoch high altitude research station and Max Perutz University of York
- Perutz Glacier 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.