© 2007 • 352 pp., illus., glossary, index
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Don’t miss the new podcast and online slideshow featuring Georgina Ferry discussing her book and Max Perutz.

Few scientists have thought more deeply about the nature of their calling and its impact on humanity than Max Perutz (1914–2002). Born in Vienna, Jewish by descent, lapsed Catholic by religion, he came to Cambridge in 1936 to join the lab of the legendary Communist thinker J.D. Bernal. There he began to explore the structures of the molecules that hold the secret of life. In 1940, he was interned and deported to Canada as an enemy alien, only to be brought back and set to work on a bizarre top secret war project. In 1947, he founded the small research group in which Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the structure of DNA: under his leadership it grew to become the world–famous Laboratory for Molecular Biology. Max himself explored the protein hemoglobin and his work, which won him a Nobel Prize in 1962, launched a new era of medicine, heralding today’s astonishing advances in the genetic basis of disease.

Max Perutz’s story, wonderfully told by Georgina Ferry, brims with life. It has the zest of an adventure novel and is full of extraordinary characters. Max was demanding, passionate and driven but also humorous, compassionate and loving. Small in stature, he became a fearless mountain climber; drawing on his own experience as a refugee, he argued fearlessly for human rights; he could be ruthless but had a talent for friendship. An articulate and engaging advocate of science, he found new problems to engage his imagination until weeks before he died aged 88.

About the author: Georgina Ferry is a former staff editor on New Scientist, and contributor to BBC Radio 4’s Science Now. Her books include the acclaimed biography Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life (1998); The Common Thread (2002, with Sir John Sulston); and A Computer Called LEO (2003). She lives in Oxford.

  “Ferry succeeds in bringing [Perutz] sharply to life....[she] avoids the pop-psychology that permeates so many modern biographies, while offering insight into Perutz’s temperament and behaviour.”
      —Gregory A. Petsko, Brandeis University (Nature)

  “Georgina Ferry has written a superb biography of one of the most influential and likable figures of modern science, Max Perutz of Cambridge University...In places the book reads like a novel, but its facts are always correct...Ferry does a magnificent job of expressing the doubts, difficulties, and uncertainty of Max Perutz’s life...Unreservedly recommended!”
      —Protein Science

  “Ferry continues to shine as a first-rate science writer with this new biography.”
      —Choice

  “In 2002, Georgina Ferry, author of an acclaimed biography of Nobel laureate Dorothy Hodgkin, was called to the bedside of the dying 88-year-old Max Perutz, a former friend and colleague of Hodgkin’s.His request was simple — do for him what she had done for Hodgkin. The result is Max Perutz and the secret of life, a thoroughly engaging account of the birth of molecular biology as told through the life story of one of its most enigmatic founders...

[T]his is a wonderful book, effectively presenting a complex man in a complex time and reminding us that unusual career training pathways, scientific rigor, and collaborative transdisciplinary science are not new ideas of the 21st century.”
      —The Journal of Clinical Investigation

  “Biographies that are most apt to appeal to physicians offer a coherent and accurate account of the subject’s contributions to medicine, along with insights into his or her character and personality. Georgina Ferry amply fulfills these criteria in her account of the life of Max Perutz, the Nobel laureate who worked out the structure of hemoglobin and the chemical basis of its physiological properties. Her lively narrative draws us into the world of high-powered science, with its triumphs, frustrations, and foibles.”
      —The New England Journal of Medicine

List of Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgements

1. Scenes from a Vienna Childhood

2. ‘It Was Cambridge That Made Me’

3. ‘The Most Dangerous Characters of All’

4. Home and Homeland

5. Mountains and Mahomet

6. How Haemoglobin Was Not Solved

7. Annus Mirabilis

8. In Search of Solutions

9. A Structure for Science — the LMB

10. The Breathing Molecule

11. Health and Disease

12. Truth Always Wins

Select Bibliography

Notes

Glossary

Index