Perutz was born in
Vienna, the son of Adele "Dely" (Goldschmidt) and Hugo Perutz, a textile manufacturer. His parents were Jewish by ancestry, but had baptised Perutz in the Catholic religion. Although Perutz rejected religion and was an atheist in his later years, he was against offending others for their religious beliefs. His parents hoped that he would become a lawyer, but he became interested in chemistry while at school. Overcoming his parents' objections he enrolled as a chemistry undergraduate at the
University of Vienna and completed his degree in 1936. Made aware by lecturer Fritz von Wessely of the advances being undertaken at the
University of Cambridge into biochemistry by a team led by
Gowland Hopkins, he asked
Professor Mark, who was soon to visit Cambridge, to make inquiries of Hopkins about whether there would be a place for him. Mark forgot, but had visited
J.D. Bernal, who was looking for a research student to assist him with studies into X-ray crystallography. Perutz was dismayed as he knew nothing about the subject. Mark countered by saying that he would soon learn. Bernal accepted him as a research student in his
crystallography research group at the
Cavendish Laboratory. His father had deposited £500 with his London agent to support him. He learnt quickly. Bernal encouraged him to use the X-ray diffraction method to study the structure of proteins. As protein crystals were difficult to obtain, he used horse haemoglobin crystals, and began his doctoral thesis on its structure. Haemoglobin was a subject which was to occupy him for most of his professional career. He completed his Ph.D. under
Lawrence Bragg in 1940. He applied to
Kings and
St. John's colleges, and became a member of
Peterhouse, on the basis that it served the best food. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse in 1962. He took a keen interest in the Junior Members, and was a regular and popular speaker at the Kelvin Club, the college's scientific society.
World War II When
Hitler took over Austria in 1938, Perutz's parents managed to escape to Switzerland, but they had lost all of their money. As a result, Perutz lost their financial support. With his ability to ski, experience in mountaineering since childhood and his knowledge of crystals, Perutz was accepted as a member of a three-man team to study the conversion of snow into ice in Swiss glaciers in the summer of 1938. His resulting article for the
Proceedings of the Royal Society made him known as an expert on glaciers. Lawrence Bragg, who was Professor of Experimental Physics at the Cavendish, thought that Perutz's research into haemoglobin had promise and encouraged him to apply for a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to continue his research. The application was accepted in January 1939 and with the money Perutz was able to bring his parents from Switzerland to England in March 1939. After being interned for several months he returned to Cambridge. Because of his pre-War research into the changes in the arrangement of the crystals in the layers of a glacier, he was asked for advice on whether if a battalion of commandos were landed in Norway, could they be hidden in shelters under glaciers. His knowledge on the subject of ice then led to him being recruited for
Project Habakkuk in 1942. This was a secret project to build an ice platform in the mid-Atlantic, which could be used to refuel aircraft. To that end he investigated the recently invented mixture of ice and woodpulp known as
pykrete. He carried out early experiments on pykrete in a secret location underneath
Smithfield Meat Market in the
City of London.
Establishment of the Molecular Biology Unit After the War he returned briefly to glaciology, demonstrating how glaciers flow. In 1947, Perutz, with the support of Professor Bragg, was successful in obtaining support from the
Medical Research Council (MRC) to undertake research into the molecular structure of biological systems. This financial support allowed him to establish the Molecular Biology Unit at the Cavendish Laboratory. Perutz's new unit attracted researchers who realised that the field of molecular biology had great promise; among them were
Francis Crick in 1949 and
James D. Watson in 1951. In 1953, 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. In 1959 he employed this method to determine the molecular structure of the protein
haemoglobin, which transports
oxygen in the blood. This work resulted in his sharing with
John Kendrew the 1962
Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Fifty years later, in 2013, 9,500 molecular structures of proteins were determined by X-ray crystallography. After 1959, Perutz and his colleagues went on to determine the structure of oxy- and deoxy- haemoglobin at high resolution. As a result, in 1970, he was at last able to suggest how it works as a molecular machine: how it switches between its deoxygenated and its oxygenated states, in turn triggering the uptake of oxygen and then its release to the muscles and other organs. Further work over the next two decades refined and corroborated the proposed mechanism. In addition Perutz studied the structural changes in a number of haemoglobin diseases and how these might affect oxygen binding. He 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. A further interest was the variation of the haemoglobin molecule from species to species to suit differing habitats and patterns of behaviour. In his final years Perutz turned to the study of changes in protein structures implicated in Huntington and other neurodegenerative diseases. He 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".
DNA structure and Rosalind Franklin During the early 1950s, while Watson and Crick were trying to determine the structure of
deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), they were given by Perutz an unpublished 1952 progress report for the
King's College laboratory of
Sir John Randall. This report contained
X-ray diffraction images taken by
Rosalind Franklin that proved to be crucial in coming to the double-helix structure. 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. Later this action was criticised by Randall and others, in view of the results and the honours resulting from this "gift". In an effort to clarify this issue, Perutz later published the report, arguing that it included nothing that Franklin had not said in a talk she gave in late 1951, which Watson had attended. Perutz also added that the report was addressed to an MRC committee created to "establish contact between the different groups of people working for the Council". Randall's and Perutz's labs were both funded by the MRC.
The author In his later years, Perutz was a regular reviewer/essayist for
The New York Review of Books on biomedical subjects. Many of these essays are reprinted in his 1998 book,
I wish I had made you angry earlier. In August 1985,
The New Yorker published his account of his experiences as an internee during World War II, titled "That Was the War: Enemy Alien". Perutz won the
Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science in 1997. A collection of Perutz's correspondence was published posthumously in 2009, titled
What a Time I Am Having: Selected Letters of Max Perutz.
The scientist-citizen 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. He 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. For 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. These criticisms extended to scientists who attack religion, in particular to Dawkins. Statements which offend people's religious faith were for Perutz tactless and simply damage the reputation of science, though he did not criticize scientists opposing "demonstrably false" theories such as
creationism. He concluded that "even if we do not believe in God, we should try to live as though we did." Within days of the
11 September attacks in 2001, Perutz wrote to British Prime Minister
Tony Blair, appealing to him to not respond with military force: "I am alarmed by the American cries for vengeance and concerned that President Bush's retaliation will lead to the death of thousands more innocent people, driving us into a world of escalating terror and counter-terror. I do hope that you can use your restraining influence to prevent this happening."
Honours and awards Perutz was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1954. Max Perutz received a number of other important honours: he was appointed a
Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1963, elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences that same year, received the
Austrian Decoration for Science and Art in 1967, was elected to the
American Philosophical Society in 1968, elected to the United States
National Academy of Sciences in 1970, received the
Royal Medal of the
Royal Society in 1971, appointed a
Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1975, received the
Copley Medal in 1979 and became a
Member of the Order of Merit in 1988. Perutz was made a Member of the
German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 1964, received an Honorary doctorate from the
University of Vienna (1965) and received the
Wilhelm Exner Medal in 1967. He was elected to
EMBO Membership in 1964. The
European Crystallographic Association established the Max Perutz Prize, named in his honour.
Lectures In 1980, Perutz was invited to deliver one of the six lectures for the
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on
The Chicken, the Egg and the Molecules.
Books • 1962.
Proteins and Nucleic Acids: Structure and Function. Amsterdam and London. Elsevier • 1989.
Is Science Necessary? Essays on science and scientists. London. Barrie and Jenkins. • 1990.
Mechanisms of Cooperativity and Allosteric Regulation in Proteins. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press • 1992.
Protein Structure: New Approaches to Disease and Therapy. New York. Freeman. • 1997.
Science is Not a Quiet Life: Unravelling the Atomic Mechanism of Haemoglobin. Singapore. World Scientific. • 2002.
I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier. Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. • 2009.
What a Time I Am Having: Selected Letters of Max Perutz edited by Vivien Perutz. Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. ==Personal life==