Max Ferdinand Perutz 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.
28 Facts About Max Perutz
2.
Max Perutz went on to win the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1971 and the Copley Medal in 1979.
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Max Perutz was born in Vienna, the son of Adele "Dely" and Hugo Max Perutz, a textile manufacturer.
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Max Perutz's parents were Jewish by ancestry, but had baptised Perutz in the Catholic religion.
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Max Perutz's parents hoped that he would become a lawyer, but he became interested in chemistry while at school.
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Max Perutz applied to Kings and St John's colleges, and became a member of Peterhouse, on the basis that it served the best food.
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Max Perutz was elected an Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse in 1962.
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Max Perutz took a keen interest in the Junior Members, and was a regular and popular speaker at the Kelvin Club, the College's scientific society.
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When Hitler took over Austria in 1938, Max Perutz's parents managed to escape to Switzerland, but they had lost all of their money.
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Max Perutz's resulting article for the Proceedings of the Royal Society made him known as an expert on glaciers.
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The application was accepted in January 1939 and with the money Max Perutz was able to bring his parents from Switzerland to England in March 1939.
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Max Perutz carried out early experiments on pykrete in a secret location underneath Smithfield Meat Market in the City of London.
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In 1953, Max Perutz showed that diffracted X-rays from protein crystals could be phased by comparing the patterns from crystals of the protein with and without heavy atoms attached.
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Max Perutz hoped that the molecule could be made to function as a drug receptor and that it would be possible to inhibit or reverse the genetic errors such as those that occur in sickle cell anaemia.
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Max Perutz demonstrated that the onset of Huntington disease is related to the number of glutamine repeats as they bind to form what he called a "polar zipper".
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Max Perutz did this without Franklin's knowledge or permission, and before she had a chance to publish a detailed analysis of the content of her unpublished progress report.
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Max Perutz added that the report was addressed to an MRC committee created to "establish contact between the different groups of people working for the Council".
18.
Randall's and Max Perutz's labs were both funded by the MRC.
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Max Perutz won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science in 1997.
20.
Max Perutz attacked the theories of philosophers Sir Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn and biologist Richard Dawkins in a lecture given at Cambridge on 'Living Molecules' in 1994.
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Max Perutz criticised Popper's notion that science progresses through a process of hypothesis formation and refutation, saying that hypotheses are not necessarily the basis of scientific research and, in molecular biology at least, they are not necessarily subject to revision either.
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For Max Perutz, Kuhn's notion that science advances in paradigm shifts that are subject to social and cultural pressures is an unfair representation of modern science.
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Max Perutz was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1954.
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Max Perutz was made a Member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 1964, received an Honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna and received the Wilhelm Exner Medal in 1967.
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The European Crystallographic Association established the Max Perutz Prize, named in his honour.
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In 1980, Max Perutz was invited to deliver one of the six lectures for the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on The Chicken, the Egg and the Molecules.
27.
In 1942, Max Perutz married Gisela Clara Mathilde Peiser, a medical photographer.
28.
Max Perutz died on 6 February 2002 and his ashes were interred with his parents Hugo Perutz and Dely Perutz in the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge.