- Person
- Max Perutz
- Lived
- 1914–2002
- Field
- Molecular biology
- From
- Austrian-British
The story
Haemoglobin is the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body. In September 1937 Max Perutz, a young research student from Vienna working at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, learned from his cousin Felix Haurowitz in Prague that the oxygen-carrying and oxygen-free forms of haemoglobin form different crystals. He decided to work out its three-dimensional structure and so solve a great problem in biochemistry. No one had ever determined the structure of anything nearly so large: haemoglobin has a molecular weight of about 64,500.
The work spanned two worlds. The biochemist G. S. Adair made him his first crystals of horse haemoglobin, the protein chemistry was done at David Keilin's Molteno Institute and the X-ray work at the Cavendish, with Perutz bridging the gap between biology and physics on his bicycle. He completed his PhD in 1940, but his early attempts to calculate the structure led to misleading results.
His 1953 discovery that heavy atoms such as mercury could be attached to the protein without disturbing its crystals finally made the problem solvable. A full three-dimensional picture needed several different heavy-atom derivatives, and it took years more of work. In 1959 Perutz and his colleagues produced the first three-dimensional model of haemoglobin, showing its four protein chains, the coils of alpha helix within them and their iron-containing haem groups. It closely resembled myoglobin, which his colleague John Kendrew had solved by similar methods, and when the amino acid sequences became available they fitted the structures well.
In 1962 Perutz shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kendrew for their studies of the structures of globular proteins. Haemoglobin and myoglobin were the first proteins whose shapes anyone had seen. Through the 1960s Perutz's team refined the structures of both forms of haemoglobin to atomic detail, which allowed him to explain how the molecule picks up and releases oxygen.
The achievement proved that the molecules of life could be mapped atom by atom. It opened the way to structural biology, now used to understand how proteins work, how mutations cause disease and how new medicines can be designed to fit their targets.
Why it matters
Seeing haemoglobin's structure proved that the molecules of life could be mapped atom by atom, opening the way to understanding thousands of proteins.
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'.
- 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.
Sources
- Max Perutz Wikipedia
- Max Ferdinand Perutz (obituary by Francis Crick) Physics Today
- Max Perutz American Crystallographic Association history
- Max F. Perutz: Biographical Nobel Prize
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.