Max Perutz

Perutz came from a Viennese Jewish family and fled to Britain, where he spent more than two decades using X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of haemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein of blood. Solving the «phase problem» with heavy-atom methods, he produced the first detailed picture of a large protein and shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He founded the Cambridge laboratory that became a powerhouse of molecular biology.