Max Perutz 1914-2002 - Nobel-prize winning scientist, author and mentor dies

Nature ^ | 2-7-02 | CHRISTOPHER SURRIDGE

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Max Perutz: shaped modern biology.

© AP

Max Perutz died yesterday, Wednesday, 6 February 2002.

It would be difficult to overestimate Perutz's influence on modern biology. His pioneering work solving protein structures, his inspiration of others and his founding and directing of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he actively worked until Christmas last year, 22 years after his official 'retirement', shaped what we now know as molecular biology.

Born in Vienna in 1914, Perutz studied chemistry at Vienna University before moving to Cambridge in 1936 to do his PhD in the Cavendish Laboratory under the founding father of X-ray crystallography, J. D. Bernal. Here he encountered the object of his studies for the next 40 years, crystals of the blood protein haemoglobin.

Haemoglobin is the protein that makes our blood red; it transports the oxygen that we breathe, from our lungs to all parts of our body. Before Perutz's work, no one had any idea what this, or any other protein, looked like, or how it worked.

Bernal showed Perutz that, with care, proteins could be made to form crystals which, when placed in front of a beam of X-rays, produce a regular pattern of spots. This diffraction pattern holds all the information needed to work out the positions of the numerous atoms in a protein.

Perutz set about finding a way to convert a protein's diffraction pattern into a three-dimensional model of its molecular structure. In 1953, under the encouragement of Sir Lawrence Bragg, then head of the Cavendish Laboratory, Perutz cracked this so-called 'phase problem' by comparing the patterns produced by protein crystals that contained different heavy-metal ions.

Max will be remembered as much for his science as for his endless drive and passion for knowledge and better communication of research.

George Radda, Medical Research Council, UK

Using this approach, John Kendrew, the first of Perutz's many illustrious research students, produced the very first structure of a protein, the muscle protein myoglobin, in 1957. Myoglobin is a smaller and less complicated blood protein than haemoglobin, the structure of which Perutz finally solved in 1959. These studies won Perutz and Kendrew the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1962.

Elucidating the structure of haemoglobin enabled Perutz to explain how the protein works in taking up oxygen in the lungs only to release it again in the tissues. He also realized how mutations - small changes in the structure of the protein - could lead to diseases such as sickle-cell anaemia.

Today, thousands of protein structures are solved each year to answer exactly the same questions that Perutz grappled with for haemoglobin: how does it work and what happens when it doesn't work properly?

Indeed the molecular mechanisms behind disease fascinated Perutz' throughout his life. In later years he turned his attention to degenerative brain conditions such as Huntingdon's disease. His last publication in Nature in July 2001 concerned how these might be caused by proteins containing abnormally long stretches of the subunit glutamine¹.

With fellow Nobel laureats: (left to right) Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, John Steinbeck, James Watson, Max Perutz and John Kendrew.

© AP

In 1947, Perutz was a founding member of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He was its chairman until his retirement in 1979. Nine Nobel laureates have so far emerged from this laboratory, perhaps the most famous of these being Francis Crick and Jim Watson, who worked out the double-helical structure of DNA in 1953 while they were research students under Perutz's guidance.

Perutz was also a great communicator. As George Radda, chief executive of the Medical Research Council, said yesterday, "Max will be remembered as much for his science as for his endless drive and passion for knowledge and better communication of research. His books and book reviews stand up as good literature as well as good science."

Max Perutz was unassuming and modest. Inclined to play down his involvement in great projects, he strenuously resisted all attempts to make him a subject for biographers. But there is no doubt that modern medicine and biotechnology owe him an enormous debt.