Max Perutz, the British chemist whose efforts to solve the riddle of life by unraveling protein structures led to the creation of the field of molecular biology, died Wednesday of cancer in his home in Cambridge, England. He was 87.
Mr. Perutz and a colleague, John C. Kendrew, were the first to determine the three-dimensional structure of proteins, the molecular machines that run cells.
Their feat garnered them the 1962 Nobel Prize in chemistry. More importantly, it gave scientists their first insight into how chemical reactions within the cell are carried out.
Enzymes, in particular, are the movers and shakers of the cellular world, said UCLA molecular biologist Richard Dickerson, “but we had no idea how they worked until we could get molecular structures.”
Mr. Perutz devised the technique known as “isomorphic replacement” that, for the first time, allowed scientists to convert the massive amounts of data obtained from shining X-rays on a protein into a precise picture of the arrangement of individual atoms. His discovery unleashed a flood of new data.
Mr. Perutz published the structure of hemoglobin–the complex protein that carries oxygen and carbon dioxide through the bloodstream–in 1959. By the end of the next decade, researchers were using his technique to publish an average of one new structure a day.
Mr. Perutz’s achievement was “absolutely monumental,” said molecular biologist Thomas Poulos of the University of California at Irvine. “He put the `molecular’ in molecular biology.”
Mr. Perutz also was the founder and first director of the renowned Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, which has produced nine Nobel laureates since the 1950s.
