Nobel Prize Recipient. Max Perutz, an Austrian-born British molecular biochemist, received world-wide recognition after being awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Jointly, he shared this award with British biochemist Sir John Cowdery Kendrew. These two scientists received the coveted award, according to the Nobel Prize committee, "for their studies of the structures of globular proteins." Well-known in the scientific community, he received 18 nominations from 1960 for the Nobel candidacy. Of the 18 nominations, four were made by 1915 Nobel Prize recipient Sir William Lawrence Bragg, with two being in chemistry and two in physics. Having the privilege to study under Bragg as a young man, he remained a close colleague of Bragg's throughout his career. Starting in the 1930s, he mapped the structure of hemoglobin, the protein part of blood used to transport oxygen to the body's cells. In 1953 Perutz showed that diffracted x-rays from protein crystals could be phased by comparing the patterns from crystals of the protein with and without heavy atoms attached. They solved the 3D structure of hemoglobin. His study, completed in 1959, was later followed by further studies of the hemoglobin molecule and its function. Born the youngest child into a wealthy family, his father made a fortune during the 19th century by the introduction of mechanical spinning and weaving into the Austrian monarchy. His family were of Spanish Jewish ancestry but he was baptized Roman Catholic, yet rejected any religious faith as an adult. At first, his parents wanted him to follow in the family business but realize that his talent was science. After studying chemistry at the University of Vienna starting in 1932, he applied to join the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in 1936, where he later completed his Ph.D. thesis while working with physicist and Communist thinker J.D. Bernal. During World War II, his family's business was lost to the Nazi invasion of Austria, thus his family became refugees in Switzerland, and his educational funding stopped. At this point, he became Bragg's research assistant with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation starting on January 1, 1939, continuing through 1945. He was able to bring his parents to safety in England in 1939. In 1940 he was arrested, exported to Canada, and interred as "an enemy alien," before returning to England, and eventually, being involved in defense-related projects. After returning to Cambridge, he was given an Imperial Chemical Industries Research Fellowship in 1945. In October of 1947, he accepted the position of head of the newly constituted Medical Research Council Unit for Molecular Biology, with Kendrew being his entire staff, but he still collaborated with Bragg through the years. He founded the small research group in which Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the structure of DNA. In March of 1963, he became the Chairman of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Besides doing research in the laboratory environment, he was a keen mountaineer and studied glacier crystals. He was accepted as a member of a three-man team to study the conversion of snow into ice in Swiss glaciers in the summer of 1938, and became known as a glacier expert. As a Fellow of the Royal Society, he was made Commander of the British Empire in 1962. Among his many honors, he received the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1971 and the Copley Medal in 1979. He is also an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1942 he married and the couple had two daughters. He had a way of writing that was easy to read but remained technical. All of his essays were published in his 1998 book, "I wish I had Made You Angry Earlier." His World War II experiences were published in 1985 in the magazine "The New Yorker," as "That Was the War: Enemy Alien." Following the encouragement of a distant cousin and novelist Leo Perutz, he published in 2009 "What a Time I Am Having: Selected Letters of Max Perutz," which was the last of his seven published books. He received the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science in 1997. He was a small statue of a man, who continued to have interesting conversations about science, until a short time before his death. After author Georgina Ferry was summoned to his deathbed for an interview, his biography was published in 2007 as "Max Perutz and the Secret of Life." He died of cancer with his cremated ashes being buried in his parents' grave, and later in 2005, his wife's ashes joined them. As of 2021, he is one of fourteen Nobel Prize recipients from the University of Cambridge and many from his laboratory.