Max Perutz, who died in Cambridge, UK, on 6 February, was one of the principal founders of molecular biology. He was the first person to find out how to determine protein structure by X-ray crystallography, after many years of patient struggle, and he applied the technique to solve the structure of haemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in blood. For this work he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962, which he shared with John Kendrew, a close colleague who worked out the structure of myoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in muscle. The results showed that it was possible to see, in the atomic detail necessary to understand mechanisms, the structure of the macromolecules that carry out many of the functions of a living cell. Such knowledge is basic to the revolution that has swept through biology in the past 50 years, and to modern medicine and biotechnology.
But besides this unique contribution, Perutz founded an extraordinarily successful biology laboratory, and, several years after his official retirement, became a prolific and erudite writer of pungent reviews and essays, notably in The New York Review of Books, and in The New Yorker. At the same time, he continued his own scientific work at a high level, right to the end. He was a quiet, modest and gentle man, but with the highest standards, and had great inner strength and confidence in his own judgement.
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