2020-02-06 Thu

Max Ferdinand Perutz was an Austrian born British biochemist. He dedicated a large part of his scientific career to unraveling the molecular structure and function of hemoglobin, the protein of red blood cells.

Born in Vienna, Jewish by descent, Catholic by religion, he came to Cambridge in 1936 to join the lab of the legendary Communist thinker J.D. Bernal. Max Perutz was co-recipient of the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his X-ray diffraction analysis of the structure of hemoglobin, the protein that transports oxygen from the lungs to the tissues via blood cells. He shared the award with British biochemist John C. Kendrew.

The founder of the LMB, Max Perutz, has been honored on a Royal Mail stamp, as part of their ‘Remarkable Lives’ series. Max is one of 10 distinguished people honored in the series, which commemorates significant people on the centenary of their birth. The stamps feature monochrome portraits of the subjects; the image of Max shows him with a diffractometer, in a photograph taken by Cambridge Newspapers in 1980.

Image Source: colnect.com