Climbing mountains

This year, the biological community mourned the loss of a great man. Max Perutz, who died of cancer on February 6, 2002, aged 87, was one of the scientific giants of the 20th Century. His life’s work on the structure of the oxygen-carrying blood protein haemoglobin created the field of structural biology. He was also one of the founding fathers of molecular biology in Europe, not least by instigating the spectacularly successful Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge. In his extensive writings, he argued for the importance of science and instructed and amused us with stories of how great science is done. But he was much more than all of this— he was also a great human being. Max, as he was called by all who knew him, was born in Vienna in 1914 into a family of wealthy textile manufacturers. Although his parents had planned for him to study law, a schoolmaster awakened his interest in chemistry, which he went on to study at the University of Vienna. He then decided to leave Austria for the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in 1936, to work towards his PhD with the brilliant and controversial Desmond Bernal. Max, inspired by Bernal’s vision that the structure of large and complex molecules such as proteins could be solved using X-ray diffraction, embarked on scaling a mountain in biology—solving the structure of haemoglobin. This was to take him more than 20 years. Max was influenced in his choice of studying haemoglobin by a family connection. The husband of one of his cousins had shown that the morphology of deoxyhaemoglobin crystals changes upon exposure to oxygen, suggesting that the conformation of haemoglobin may