Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Nobel Laureates: Max Perutz and John Kendrew

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1962.

"for their studies of the structures of globular proteins"

Max Perutz (1914-2002) and John Kendrew (1917-1997) won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for solving the structures of hemoglobin (Perutz) and myoglobin (Kendrew). This is the same year that Watson, Crick, and Wilkins won for the structure of DNA [Nobel Laureates: Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins]. Recall that Watson & Crick were working in the Perutz lab at the time of their discovery and Crick was actually working on the structure of hemoglobin as part of his Ph.D. thesis [The Story of DNA (Part 1)].

1962 was also the year that John Steinbeck won the prize for literature [see Nobel Laureates 1962].

The Presentation Speech was given by Professor G. Hägg, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Those of you who weren't yet born in 1955 should make note of the fact that this work required an enormous number of calculations that were only made possible with the help of "a very large electronic computer." Many of my students are surprised to discover that biochemists have been working with computers for over fifty years. Most of them think that computers weren't invented until about 1990 when they were just babies.
Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen.












The figures are taken from A Little Ancient History by Richard (Dick) Dickerson. The top figure shows the myoglobin/hemoglobin group outside the New Cavendish Laboratory in 1958. That's Maz Perutz in the white lab coat. The second picture is a remarkable photograph of two postdocs, Bror Strandberg (back) and Dick Dickerson (front) carrying the paper tapes for the myoglobin 2A data set. They are just outside the EDSAC II computing centre.


  1. There are few figures in the entire history of science whom I admire more than Perutz. His dogged persistence in making slow progress on highly difficult problems, and his dedication to science over an incredibly long career- he was active and publishing right up until his death, at an age when most people are long since retired- are truly amazing and inspiring.


    OTOH the computers in modern mobile phones are so innocuous that people forget about them. Yet they can do stuff that excel earlier supercomputers.

    Btw, the earliest non-manual computing devices traces back to ancient astronomy uses.

    The first modern computers from the WWII days were really something. Some weren't even Turing complete, and some required rewiring for programming. Seems the programming history there were military problems (ballistics, bomb simulations, encryption and code cracking), and only later fundamental chemistry.