Max Perutz



Max Ferdinand Perutz (19 May 1914 – 6 February 2002) was an Austrian-born British molecular biologist, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with John Kendrew, for their studies of the structures of haemoglobin and myoglobin. He went on to win the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1971 and the Copley Medal in 1979. At Cambridge he founded and chaired (1962–79) The Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), fourteen of whose scientists have won Nobel Prizes.

Quotes

 * Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral looking an object?
 * The Hemoglobin Molecule, Scientific American, 211, 65-76, November 1964. This comment refers to the appeareace of the low resolution structure of hemoglobin, which Perutz was instrumental in elucidating in a heroic effort that spanned 1937 to 1959. In the course of this work, Perutz and his co-workers developed many of the techniques that are used to this day to determine the three-dimensional structures of macromolecules.