Max Perutz

Max Ferdinand Perutz, OM (May 19 1914 – February 6 2002) was an Austrian-British molecular biologist.

He was born in Vienna in 1914. In 1936 he became a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory in a crystallography group directed by J.D. Bernal, and remained in Cambridge.

During World War II, he was asked to find a way to improve the structural qualities of ice for Project Habakkuk (a secret project to build an aircraft carrier made of ice) and investigated the recently invented mixture of ice and woodpulp known as pykrete.

In 1953 Perutz showed that the diffracted X-rays from protein crystals could be phased by comparing the patterns from crystals of the protein with and without heavy atoms attached. In 1959 he determined the molecular structure of the protein hemoglobin, which transports oxygen in the blood, using this method. In 1962 he received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, with John Kendrew.

In the history of science, Perutz is also known as the supervisor of James D. Watson and Francis Crick during the early 1950's, during which time Watson and Crick determined the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Watson and Crick made use of information from unpublished X-ray diffraction images of Franklin's (shown at meetings and shared by Wilkins), and preliminary accounts of Franklin's detailed analysis of the X-ray images that were included in a written progress report for the King's College laboratory of John Randall from late 1952. The report was given to Watson and Crick by Perutz and lead to criticism of him for doing so; Sir John Randall of King's College London was said to be angry over the report's disclosure to Crick and Watson.

It is a matter of debate whether Watson and Crick should have had access to Franklin's results without her knowledge or permission and before she had a chance to formally publish the results of her detailed analysis of her X-ray diffraction data that were included in the progress report. In an effort to clarify this issue, Perutz later published what had been in the progress report, and suggested that nothing was in the report that Franklin herself had not said in her talk (attended by Watson) in late 1951. Further, Perutz explained that the report was to a Medical Research Council committee that had been created in order to "establish contact between the different groups of people working for the Council". Randall's and Perutz's labs were both MRC funded laboratories. It is also not clear how important Franklin's unpublished results from the progress report actually were for the model building done by Watson and Crick.

Perutz established the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, England in 1962 and was chairman until 1979. He remained active in research to the end of his life. From the mid-1980s on he was a regular reviewer/essayist for The New York Review of Books on biomedical subjects.

Perutz's flair for writing was a late development. Leo Perutz, the distinguished writer and a relative, once told Max when he was a boy that he would never be a writer, and so one of his most cherished awards was one for scientific writing. "I wish I had made you angry earlier" (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; 1998) contains a selection of his essays on science, scientists and humanity. 

Max Perutz and his wife Gisela's son, Robin Perutz, is a professor of chemistry at the University of York in England; their daughter Vivien Perutz has edited a selection of Max Perutz's letters for publication by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.

An Italian biography of Max Perutz entitled "Piccole Visioni - La Grande Storia di una Molecola" was written by Marta Paterlini and published by Codice Edizioni, Turin, in May 2006; another biography (in English) by Georgina Ferry was published by Chatto & Windus in July 2007.

Max Perutz's major contribution to molecular biology in Cambridge is also well documented in The History of the University of Cambridge: Volume 4 (1870 to 1990) published by CUP in 1992.

Max Perutz was acknowledged as one of the foremost scientists of the 20th century and as the architect of arguably the most famous and successful research laboratory now in existence, the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He was seen at least weekly in his College in Cambridge, Peterhouse, until just before his death; he took a keen interest in the Junior Members, and was a regular and most popular speaker at the Kelvin Club, the College's scientific society. He matriculated in 1936 and was an Honorary Fellow from 1962 to 2002.

Books

 * Is Science Necessary: Essays on Science and Scientists
 * I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier: Essays on Science, Science, Scientists, and Humanity
 * Proteins and nucleic acids: structure and function.
 * Science is Not a Quiet Life: Unravelling the Atomic Mechanism of Haemoglobin
 * Glutamine Repeats and Neurodegenerative Diseases: Molecular Aspects
 * Le molecole dei viventi, Di Renzo Editore, Roma, ISBN: 8886044917
 * Protein Structure: A User's Guide

Books about Max Perutz

 * Paterlini, Marta, "Piccole Visioni - La Grande Storia di una Molecola"; Codice Edizioni 2006; ISBN 88-7578-052-8
 * Ferry, Georgina, "Max Perutz and the Secret of Life"; Chatto & Windus 2007; ISBN 0-701-17695-4; (in US) Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 2007.
 * Medawar, Jean and Pyke, David, "Hitler's Gift - Scientists Who Fled Nazi Germany - Einstein, Max Perutz, Fritz Haber, Leo Szilard, Max von Laue, Max Planck & more", RCB, London, 2000; ISBN 1-860-66172-6

Other books with references to Max Perutz

 * Brown, Andrew; "J. D. Bernal: The Sage of Science", Oxford University Press, 2005; ISBN 0-199-20565-5
 * Soraya De Chadarevian; Designs For Life: Molecular Biology After World War II, CUP 2002, 444 pp; ISBN 0-521-57078-6
 * Dickerson, Richard E.; "Present at the Flood: How Structural Molecular Biology Came About", Sinauer, 2005; ISBN 0-878-93168-6;
 * Hager, Thomas; "Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling", Simon & Schuster 1995; ISBN 0-684-80909-5
 * Graeme Hunter; Light Is A Messenger, the life and science of William Lawrence Bragg, ISBN 0-19-852921-X; Oxford University Press, 2004.
 * Torsten Krude (Ed.); DNA Changing Science and Society (ISBN 0-521-82378-1) CUP 2003. (The Darwin Lectures for 2003, including one by Sir Aaron Klug on Rosalind Franklin's involvement in the determination of the structure of DNA).
 * Brenda Maddox Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, 2002. ISBN 0-00-655211-0.
 * Matt Ridley; Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code (Eminent Lives) HarperCollins Publishers; 192 pp, ISBN 0-06-082333-X.
 * Anne Sayre. 1975. Rosalind Franklin and DNA. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. ISBN 0-393-32044-8.
 * James D. Watson; The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, Atheneum, 1980, ISBN 0-689-70602-2 (first published in 1968)* James D. Watson; The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA; The Norton Critical Edition, which was published in 1980, edited by Gunther S. Stent: ISBN 0-393-01245-X.
 * Maurice Wilkins; The Third Man of the Double Helix: The Autobiography of Maurice Wilkins ISBN 0-19-860665-6.