John kendrew and max perutz biography

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The first electronic computer, the ENIAC, which became operational in Philadelphia in 1945, was 10,000 times the speed of a human performing a calculation.

In 1987 Kendrew retired but continued to travel extensively, attend concerts, and participate in college life at Oxford and Cambridge until his death in August 1997 at the age of 80.

As for Perutz, he continued to carry out research on protein structure for more than six decades, right up to his death in February 2002 at the age of 87.

Nobel Prize Lecture [1962],” pp. A deep understanding of several inherited diseases enabled Perutz to open up the new field that he himself named 'molecular pathology', adding to our knowledge of molecular evolution.
Solving the structure of haemoglobin was only the beginning for Perutz. He used horse haemoglobin crystals, and began his doctoral thesis on its structure.

Detailed structural data emerged from the detection of many pathological variants of haemoglobin collected worldwide from a large range of living creatures and numerous humans and the exact symptoms of each mutant gave new information about the function of different features of the haemoglobin molecule. 79-84. In their early work, the Braggs made a series of approximations in order to unravel the complex tangle that the reflexions from some crystal represented.

Thanks to this wealth of expertise on the biochemistry and physiology of haemoglobin, and stimulated by Bernal's visionary faith in the power of X-ray diffraction, Perutz pursued his studies in protein crystallography.
By 1960, Kendrew and his team were able to obtain a map of the myoglobin molecule at 2-angstrom resolution.

Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 47: 227-256

Klug A. (2002) Structural Biology and Biochemistry: Max Perutz (1914-2002) Science, New Series 295 (5564): 2382-2383

Perutz M. F. (1963) X-ray Analysis of haemoglobin. By comparing the original and the modified patterns, it was now possible to determine the location of specific atoms and hence gain important information about the structure of the crystal.

The model contained a number of dense rod-like features that made up the bulk of the polypeptide chain. These all have to be measured in several isomorphous compounds, then the results are corrected by various geometric factors and finally used to build up an image. During World War II Perutz was classified an enemy alien by the British and held in an internment camp in Canada, whereas Kendrew left the military as an honorary wing commander after six years of distinguished service.

X-ray analysis involves the reverse calculation: Given the X-ray pattern, what is the crystal structure that produced it? Von Laue's hypothesis was brilliantly confirmed by Walter Friedrich and Paul Knipping, by passing a beam of X rays through a crystal onto a photographic plate and producing a pattern of spots.

Only by the summer of 1957 did Kendrew and his team succeed in creating a three-dimensional map of myoglobin at a resolution the so-called “low resolution”of 6 angstroms; thus myoglobin became “the first protein to be solved” (Judson, p. The upside of these Patterson maps was that you didn't need to know the phases of the reflections, but the downside was that creating a Patterson map was a hugely time-consuming task even for simple compounds, involving hundreds of calculations for each spot in a diffraction pattern.