People of Science with Brian Cox - Venki Ramakrishnan on Max Perutz
Transcript
- Hello, I’m Professor Brian Cox. Welcome to People of Science.
- So Venki, could you describe who you are and what your area of research is?
- I’m Venki Ramakrishnan.
- I’m a molecular biologist and I’m also president of the Royal Society.
- Brian: This is a series about inspirational scientists from history.
- So who is your person of science?
- Venki: So the person I’ve chosen is Max Perutz,
- who founded the field of structural biology
- and also founded one of the most successful institutes for molecular biology in the world.
- Brian: If you could characterise his legacy, as a scientist,
- how would you characterise it?
- Venki: Well, first of all he gave us our first glimpse of what a protein looks like.
- And that has told us a huge amount about how biological molecules work, how do enzymes work,
- how do molecules recognise each other inside the cell.
- Modern biology would be unthinkable without Max’s pioneering work.
- Brian: Could you describe his scientific career,
- particularly focusing on the Nobel Prize.
- Venki: He grew up and was educated in Austria.
- And he says he wanted to know the secret of life
- and therefore he sought out the crystallographer,
- working in Cambridge, J.D. Bernal.
- And when Max went to work for Bernal in the thirties,
- the largest molecule that had been solved had about, fewer than a hundred atoms, I think.
- And he wanted to solve haemoglobin which had over twenty-thousand atoms.
- And as a result of that, he acquired a graduate student who went on to become his colleague, John Kendrew.
- And because they didn’t have stable funding,
- they built a hut over a bicycle shed in the courtyard of the Cavendish
- and that’s where Max Perutz and John Kendrew worked.
- And it took twenty-three years to solve haemoglobin,
- but that work founded the whole field of structural biology.
- Brian: This is a very focussed story in a sense.
- You said twenty years or more, during which, the Second World War broke out.
- Venki: When the war broke out, the British government shipped him off to Canada
- in an internment camp as an enemy alien.
- His mentor, J.D. Bernal, wanted him back to help him with the war effort
- and requisitioned him.
- And the British government had to do a security check on him
- and the security check said, “He seems fine except he’s been known to associate with that notorious communist, J.D. Bernal.”
- Not realising that Bernal was the one who had requisitioned him.
- He was often asked where did he feel he was from?
- And he said, “My reply is usually evasive, because they would not understand
- if I tell them that I belong to the Royal Society and that is all I need.”
- Brian: And here is a collection of his essays, “Is Science Necessary?”
- It says here, “Scientists have changed our way of life more drastically than television stars, statesmen and generals.”
- He's right.
- Brian: Unusually, I think for the only time in this series, you knew personally, Max Perutz.
- Venki: I knew him very well. In fact, I saw him every day, practically, for a number of years.
- I could think of him as a sort of a mentor and friend.
- Brian: How did you first meet him?
- Venki: I first met Max Perutz in the eighties.
- But then I spent a year at the LMB, which he had founded.
- And the LMB was founded in Max’s vision
- it has almost no hierarchy.
- So there’s no sort of senior scientist table or faculty club or any of that.
- And that’s partly a reason for its success, you know,
- it won its sixteenth Nobel laureate last year with Richard Henderson.
- Brian: That idea that he could also leave a legacy
- by building a research lab in his image
- is interesting to me because not only do you have one of the great researchers here, who wins the Nobel Prize,
- but also as you said, manages to generate a further, I don’t know, more than ten at least Nobel Prizes,
- as a result of imposing his vision of how science should be done.
- Venki: Yes. He also must have had tremendous initiative to persuade the Medical Research Council
- that there’s a new way of looking at biology and it needed an institute of its own.
- You know, Max came across as very eccentric
- but underneath that I think he had a will of steel.
- He was unafraid to be himself, I could put it like that.
Venki Ramakrishnan talks to Brian Cox about Max Perutz, whose work mapping molecules such as haemoglobin laid the foundations for the field of molecular biology.
With special thanks to MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Archive credits:
J.D. Bernal image: Peter Lofts
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