Max Perutz

Max Ferdinand Perutz (19 May 1914 – 6 February 2002) was an Austrian-born British molecular biologist renowned for pioneering the application of X-ray crystallography to elucidate the three-dimensional structures of proteins. Born in Vienna to a family in the textile industry, Perutz fled Austria after the Nazi annexation in 1938 and settled in Cambridge, where he conducted his groundbreaking research at the Cavendish Laboratory and later the Medical Research Council Unit for Molecular Biology, which he helped establish and direct. His determination of the molecular structure of haemoglobin—the oxygen-carrying protein in blood—provided critical insights into its function and laid foundational principles for structural biology. For these advancements, Perutz shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Cowdery Kendrew, recognizing their independent but complementary work on globular proteins like haemoglobin and myoglobin. Perutz's laboratory became a hub for molecular biology, fostering discoveries including the double helix of DNA and RNA splicing, while his later research explored allosteric mechanisms in proteins and sickle-cell anaemia.

Max Ferdinand Perutz was born on May 19, 1914, in Vienna, Austria, into a prosperous family of textile manufacturers. His parents, Hugo Perutz and Dely Goldschmidt, descended from families that had amassed wealth in the 19th century through innovations in mechanical spinning and weaving under the Austrian monarchy. The Perutz family was secular and assimilated Jewish by ancestry, reflecting the cultural integration common among Vienna's upper-middle-class Jewish industrialists at the time.

By the mid-1930s, escalating antisemitism in Austria, intensified by the spread of Nazi influence, cast a shadow over the family's security, leading to early considerations of emigration to safeguard opportunities abroad. The Perutzes, like many assimilated Jewish families, faced mounting discrimination that foreshadowed the 1938 Anschluss and subsequent expropriation of their business, prompting proactive steps to relocate assets and family members. This precarious climate, combined with Perutz's academic inclinations, reinforced his determination to pursue independent scholarly paths beyond Vienna's deteriorating conditions.

As Austria's political instability mounted in the mid-1930s—marked by authoritarian rule under Engelbert Dollfuss and rising antisemitism affecting Jewish families like Perutz's— he resolved to seek postgraduate opportunities abroad to advance his research inclinations in a more stable environment.