Contrary to the implication in some obituaries, Max Perutz, who died on Feb. 6, 2002 in Cambridge, England, just a few months before his 88th birthday, did not determine the first three-dimensional structure of a protein molecule. John Kendrew did that. Max did determine the structure of the hemoglobin molecule, but Kendrew's low-resolution myoglobin structure predated the 5.5 Ångstrom-resolution hemoglobin structure by more than a year, and when Max published his low-resolution work showi

We lost another one last week. A bright young assistant professor in his first few years as an independent faculty member at a university E-mailed me to say that he was leaving academic science. He wasn't leaving because he wanted a bigger salary, or because he hated his job--quite the contrary; this is a man who loved what he was doing passionately. He was leaving because he had been unable to get funding for his research. This happens, of course, to people with bad ideas, or no ideas, but I do

Sixteenth century prayer, attributed to Thomas Nashe