Max Perutz. Portrait of Max Ferdinand Perutz (born 1914), Austrian-British molecular biologist. Perutz studied proteins by X-ray diffraction. In 1937 he began to study haemoglobin, the protein in blood cells which carries oxygen. In 1953 he began using an isomorphous replacement technique, incorporating gold and mercury atoms into the haemoglobin molecule; this made it easier to compute atomic positions. In 1959 he showed that haemoglobin was comprised of four chains and contained over 12,000 atoms. His student, J.C. Kendrew used similar methods to study a related protein, myoglobin. Perutz and Kendrew shared the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1962.