It's the birthday of Max Perutz, who was born in 1914 in Vienna. Perutz studied chemistry at the University of Vienna. For his PhD he went to the University of Cambridge, where he became one of pioneers in the application of x-ray crystallography to molecular biology. In 1937 he began studying the structure of the blood-transporting protein hemoglobin. The project, which took him 22 years to complete, earned him a share of the 1962 Nobel chemistry prize with his Cambridge colleague John Kendrew. That same year, his graduate student, Francis Crick, was awarded the Nobel medicine prize with James Watson for their determination of the physical and chemical structure of DNA.
