- Person
- Max Perutz
- Lived
- 1914–2002
- Field
- Molecular biology
- From
- Austrian-British
The story
In early 1962 the Medical Research Council's small molecular biology unit left its cramped rooms in the Cavendish Laboratory for a new building on the outskirts of Cambridge, on the site that later became part of Addenbrooke's Hospital. Frederick Sanger's protein chemistry group and Aaron Klug from London joined it, and the new Laboratory of Molecular Biology was opened by Queen Elizabeth II. Max Perutz became its chairman in March 1962, a post he held until 1979.
It began with about 40 scientists, a number that grew rapidly with an influx of young researchers from the United States. Within months it celebrated twice: Perutz and John Kendrew shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Francis Crick and James Watson a share of the prize for medicine. The laboratory has held lab-wide parties for every Nobel Prize since.
Perutz ran it in an unusual way. His rule was that the act of doing science should be made easy at every level. The laboratory had a single budget, with no personal budgets and all equipment shared, and supplies could be taken from a central store with just a signature. There was no obvious hierarchy, everyone was on first-name terms, and staff from different divisions met freely in the canteen. The Medical Research Council's reviews were deliberately light, leaving the scientists free to pursue long-term problems, and Perutz himself kept working at the bench.
Francis Crick, writing his obituary, said Perutz unobtrusively led the laboratory to many successes, including a series of Nobel Prizes and four members of the Order of Merit, and called him the still centre of the revolution in molecular biology.
The Laboratory of Molecular Biology became one of the most productive scientific institutions in history. By its own count, the work of its scientists has been recognised with 12 Nobel Prizes shared among 16 people, for discoveries including Sanger's methods for sequencing DNA, César Milstein and Georges Köhler's monoclonal antibodies, the structure of the ribosome, cryo-electron microscopy and antibody engineering. Today it houses around 450 scientists, and its new building, opened in 2013, has a lecture theatre named after Max Perutz.
Why it matters
The laboratory Perutz shaped produced discoveries behind gene sequencing, antibody drugs and much of modern biomedicine.
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.
- 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'.
- 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 Ferdinand Perutz (obituary by Francis Crick) Physics Today
- Max Perutz American Crystallographic Association history
- Nobel Prizes MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
- MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology Wikipedia
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