Max Perutz, John Kendrew, Peterhouse, and the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory
In this extract from his book Architects of Structural Biology, John Meurig Thomas gives an introduction to molecular biologists Max Perutz and John Kendrew, and their time at the University of Cambridge.
Two Fellows of Peterhouse, the oldest and smallest conventional college of the University of Cambridge — Max Ferdinand Perutz and John Cowdery Kendrew — are acknowledged as the founders (in 1962) of one of the world’s leading scientific establishments — the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), Cambridge, of the Medical Research Council (MRC) of the United Kingdom (UK). Perutz and Kendrew were also crucially involved in establishing the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), and it was Kendrew who became the first Director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) founded in Heidelberg in 1974. It, too, is now renowned as a world-leading centre in molecular biology.
Kendrew, as a teaching Fellow of Peterhouse, was Director of Studies for students reading the natural sciences and the history and philosophy of science. In 1959, from his rooms in college, he founded the first and, for a long time, leading journal in his field (Journal of Molecular Biology). Yet its inception was greeted with scepticism by many eminent contemporary biologists. Thus, the erudite Conrad Waddington, a British developmental biologist, geneticist, embryologist, and philosopher, wrote a strongly antipathetic letter to the journal Nature (8 April 1961), claiming that the name ‘molecular biology’ was unfortunate and only marginally appropriate to any aspect of the then existing area of biology. This journal now has a global readership of over 2.1 million (downloads) per month and it reaches some thirteen million scientists each month.
In 1959, from his rooms in college, he founded the first and, for a long time, leading journal in his field (Journal of Molecular Biology). Yet its inception was greeted with scepticism by many eminent contemporary biologists.
Starting their joint scientific work in 1945 — Kendrew was Perutz’s first PhD research student — these two pioneered the use of X-ray crystallography to determine the structures of proteins, in a manner that had not been undertaken by chemists and biochemists hitherto. It was in 1962 that they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for accomplishing their work on haemoglobin and myoglobin, proteins that carry and store oxygen.
During the course of their studies, they continued to collaborate with their mentor Sir Lawrence Bragg, who, from 1953 to 1966, was Director of the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory (DFRL) at the Royal Institution in London, where Perutz and Kendrew had appointments from 1953 to 1966 as Honorary Readers in Crystallography.
It was at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, that Sir Lawrence Bragg was able to establish for Perutz the MRC Unit for Biological Structures, which, after 1962, became the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, on a site close to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. It was also in 1962 that the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology was awarded, for the determination of the structure of DNA, to two members of the Perutz–Kendrew group, namely Francis Crick, who was Perutz’s PhD student, and James D. Watson, an American geneticist, who had joined Kendrew as a postdoctoral research fellow.
A young member of the MRC Unit for the study of the molecular structure of biological systems who came to work as a PhD student, in Peterhouse and the Cavendish Laboratory, with John Kendrew, was Peter Pauling, Linus Pauling’s son, the foremost molecular biologist and chemist in the United States (US). Both Perutz and Kendrew were skilled in recruiting co-workers of exceptional intellectual ability. It was Perutz who persuaded Fred Sanger — after he had won the first of his two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry for his work on insulin — to join the LMB from the Department of Biochemistry, Cambridge. He also recruited the Argentinian Cesar Milstein, who later won the Nobel Prize for his work onmonoclonal antibodies. Yet another recruit that Perutz and Kendrew attracted (from Oxford formerly and subsequently from South Africa) was the future Nobel Prize winner Sydney Brenner. John Kendrew’s first research student, a physicist by training, was Hugh Huxley, who was later to make a major contribution to our understanding of the mechanism of muscle contraction. Many of these remarkable individuals were entrusted by the chairman of the LMB (Max Perutz) to guide scientific activities there.
Klug had earlier been working alongside Rosalind Franklin on the structure of viruses at Birkbeck College, University of London, which was headed by the polymathic J. D. Bernal, whose influence on Perutz, Kendrew, and Dorothy Hodgkin was, as described later, profound.
When John Kendrew retired as Director of Studies at Peterhouse in 1962, his replacement was Aaron Klug, who established his research base at the LMB. Klug had earlier been working alongside Rosalind Franklin on the structure of viruses at Birkbeck College, University of London, which was headed by the polymathic J. D. Bernal, whose influence on Perutz, Kendrew, and Dorothy Hodgkin was, as described later, profound. Klug became another Nobel Laureate in 1982, and another former graduate student at Peterhouse in his days at the LMB — Michael Levitt — was a joint winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2013. Numerous other eminent molecular biologists, notably John Walker (Nobel Prize in 1997), John Sulston (Nobel Prize in 2002), John Gurdon (Nobel Prize in 2012), David Blow, and Ulrich Arndt (formerly at the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory), were all recruited by Perutz (mainly) and Kendrew, Brenner, or Sanger. The recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry — Dr Richard Henderson (2017) — was interviewed and appointed by Perutz and Kendrew. And Sir Greg Winter, who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, did his PhD and a research fellowship (sponsored by Trinity College, of which he is now Master) at the LMB. (The recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — Dr Venki Ramakrishnan — was appointed when Henderson was Director of the LMB.) It was John Kendrew who recruited Jacques Dubochet, joint winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, to pursue electron microscopic studies at EMBL.
Sir John Meurig Thomas is Former Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain and the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory, London, and former Master of Peterhouse. He was Head of the Department of Physical Chemistry and Professorial Fellow of King’s College, University of Cambridge. John Meurig Thomas was knighted for services to chemistry and the popularisation of science. He has received numerous international and national awards for his work, including the Royal Medal of the Royal Society for his contributions to green chemistry and clean technology.
