The death of Max Perutz

LONDON — The Nobel prizewinner and eminent biologist Max Perutz died on the morning of 6 February 2002 at the age of 87. Sir George Radda, Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council, where Max Perutz worked for many years, described Perutz as one of the 20^th century's scientific giants. "The impact of Max's work remains a foundation on which science is being undertaken today. His Nobel prize winning work on protein structure is more relevant now than ever as we turn attention to the smallest building blocks of life to make sense of the human genome and mechanisms of disease." Perutz won a Nobel prize for chemistry in 1962, for determining the structure of hemoglobin, a pioneering application of X-ray crystallography to whole proteins.

Austrian-born Perutz was one of the founder members of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, UK, which he chaired...