A textile family in Vienna
Max Ferdinand Perutz was born in Vienna on May 19, 1914, weeks before the First World War began, into a prosperous family of textile manufacturers. His father, Hugo Perutz, and his mother, Adele “Dely” Goldschmidt, were Jewish by descent but had their son baptised a Catholic, as many assimilated Viennese Jewish families did in the last years of the Habsburg empire. They hoped he would become a lawyer and, in time, run the family business.
Instead, a schoolteacher awakened his interest in chemistry, and he enrolled at the University of Vienna to study it. The chemistry taught there struck him as old-fashioned, but one lecture opened a door. A lecturer, Fritz von Wessely, described the new biochemistry being done at Cambridge under Frederick Gowland Hopkins, and Perutz resolved to go there. He finished his Vienna degree in 1936 and, with £500 that his father deposited for him with a London agent, set out for England.
Bernal’s student
The introduction that was supposed to get him to Hopkins never quite happened; the professor who promised to make inquiries forgot. Perutz ended up instead with the brilliant, unconventional crystallographer J. D. Bernal at the Cavendish Laboratory, who accepted him as a research student in 1936. It was a fortunate accident. Bernal believed that X-ray diffraction, the technique of firing X-rays through a crystal and recording the pattern of spots they scatter into, could one day reveal the shapes of the large molecules of life.
Bernal encouraged Perutz to try proteins. Because good protein crystals were hard to come by, Perutz worked with crystals of horse haemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in red blood cells. They gave beautifully sharp diffraction patterns, but each photograph contained thousands of spots and no known method could turn them into a picture of the molecule. When Bernal left, Perutz continued under Sir Lawrence Bragg, the Cavendish professor and Nobel laureate, and completed his PhD in 1940. He joined Peterhouse, reportedly because it served the best food.
Refugee, internee, glaciologist
Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March 1938 turned the young student into a refugee. His parents escaped to Switzerland but lost their money, and his own funds ran out. Bragg encouraged him to apply to the Rockefeller Foundation, and a grant accepted in January 1939 rescued him; and in March 1939 he was able to bring his parents to England.
Perutz had also become, almost by chance, an expert on ice. In the summer of 1938 he joined a three-man expedition to the Jungfraujoch in Switzerland to study how snow turns into glacier ice, and his paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society made his name in glaciology.
When war came, Britain’s fear of spies swept up thousands of German and Austrian refugees, most of them Jewish. In 1940 Perutz was arrested as an “enemy alien” and, under the mass internment ordered that year, shipped across the Atlantic and held behind barbed wire for several months before being allowed to return to Cambridge. He later described the experience, with more wry humour than bitterness, in a 1985 essay for The New Yorker, “That Was the War: Enemy Alien.”
An aircraft carrier made of ice
Within two years the former enemy alien was working on one of Britain’s most secret projects. In 1942 the inventor Geoffrey Pyke proposed building enormous floating airfields in the mid-Atlantic out of ice, to refuel aircraft protecting convoys from U-boats. The scheme, code-named Habakkuk, depended on pykrete, a mixture of ice and wood pulp that was far tougher than ice alone.
Because of his glacier research, Perutz was recruited to test it. He ran his experiments in a refrigerated room deep beneath Smithfield Meat Market in London, hidden behind frozen animal carcasses. His measurements showed that pykrete slowly deformed under its own weight unless kept very cold, one of several problems that, together with soaring costs and changing war needs, led to the project being abandoned.
Twenty-two years on one molecule
After the war Perutz went back to haemoglobin, a molecule of four protein chains, each holding an iron-containing haem group that binds oxygen. In 1947, with Bragg’s backing, he persuaded the Medical Research Council to fund a small unit for the study of the molecular structure of biological systems. Its first members were Perutz and John Kendrew; Francis Crick joined in 1949, and James Watson arrived in 1951. It was in this unit that Watson and Crick built their model of DNA in 1953.
Perutz’s own problem remained the hardest in the field: how to recover the information lost when an X-ray pattern is recorded, the so-called phase problem. In 1953 he found the key. By chemically attaching heavy atoms such as mercury to fixed points on the haemoglobin molecule, without disturbing its crystal structure, he could compare the diffraction patterns with and without them and work out the missing phases. This method, heavy-atom isomorphous replacement, made protein crystallography possible.
Kendrew used it to solve the smaller protein myoglobin, and in 1959, 22 years after he began, Perutz and his colleagues produced the first three-dimensional model of haemoglobin. At first it was a coarse, lumpy shape, which prompted him to wonder whether the search for truth had really revealed something so “hideous and visceral looking.” Over the following decade his team refined it to atomic detail. In 1962 Perutz and Kendrew shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their studies of the structures of globular proteins.
How it changed the world
Haemoglobin and myoglobin were the first proteins whose structures anyone had seen, and they proved that the shapes of the molecules of life could be determined, atom by atom. The method Perutz devised became the foundation of structural biology. Today, the structures of hundreds of thousands of proteins have been determined, many using the descendants of his technique, and structure-based drug design, from HIV protease inhibitors to modern cancer drugs, rests on that foundation.
Perutz also showed what a structure could explain. In 1970 he proposed how haemoglobin works as a molecular machine, shifting between two shapes as it picks up oxygen in the lungs and releases it in the tissues, and he spent the next two decades refining that mechanism. He turned his attention as well to abnormal haemoglobins, explaining how single changes in the protein chain cause inherited blood disorders, and helping to establish the idea of molecular disease.
His other great contribution was institutional. In 1962 the unit moved into the new MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, which Perutz chaired until 1979. He kept it small in bureaucracy and large in freedom, and it became one of the most productive scientific institutions in history; well over a dozen of its scientists have won Nobel Prizes.
Jewish origins and a refugee’s conscience
Perutz did not practise any religion. Baptised a Catholic by Jewish parents, he later described himself as an atheist, though he disliked offending other people’s faith. Yet his life was shaped by his Jewish origins: it was as a Jew under Nazi law that he lost his homeland and his family its fortune, and it was as a Jewish refugee that he was interned. His wife, Gisela Peiser, whom he married in 1942, was also a refugee from Germany; she had been raised a Protestant, but her father had been born Jewish.
That history made him alert to injustice. In his essays he argued for human rights, freedom of expression and the responsible use of science, and after the attacks of September 11, 2001, he wrote to Prime Minister Tony Blair warning against an American thirst for vengeance.
The man at the bench
Colleagues remembered Perutz as quiet, courteous and encouraging, but utterly single-minded about the problems he thought mattered. One obituary called him the still centre of the molecular biology revolution of the late twentieth century. A skier and mountaineer since childhood, he could be found at his laboratory bench long after he had given up running the laboratory.
He was not without controversy. In the early 1950s he passed Watson and Crick a Medical Research Council report from Sir John Randall’s King’s College group that included Rosalind Franklin’s unpublished data on DNA. He did so without her knowledge, and he was later criticised for it. Perutz later published the report himself, arguing that it contained nothing Franklin had not already said in a talk that Watson had attended.
He and Gisela had two children: Vivien, who became an art historian, and Robin, who became a professor of chemistry at the University of York.
Writer, elder and legacy
In later life Perutz became a gifted essayist. He wrote reviews and essays on science and scientists for The New York Review of Books, collected in Is Science Necessary? (1989) and I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier, and he won the Lewis Thomas Prize for writing about science in 1997. Even in his eighties he took on a new research problem, studying the protein changes behind Huntington’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders. He showed that the age at which Huntington’s begins is linked to the number of repeated glutamine units in the affected protein, which he suggested could lock together in what he called a “polar zipper.”
His honours included the Royal Society’s Royal Medal in 1971 and Copley Medal in 1979, appointment as a Companion of Honour in 1975 and the Order of Merit in 1988. Max Perutz died of cancer in Cambridge on February 6, 2002, aged 87, still a working scientist. His ashes were buried with his parents in the Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge.
The schoolboy whose parents wanted him to be a lawyer, the refugee locked up as a suspected enemy, left behind the method that opened the inner structure of life to view, and the laboratory that taught the world how to use it.
Sources & further reading
Max Perutz, Wikipedia · Max Ferdinand Perutz, obituary by Francis Crick, Physics Today · Max Perutz, American Crystallographic Association history · Max Perutz, Wikiquote · Project Habakkuk, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.