Max Perutz was born in Vienna, Austria, to parents who were both from prosperous textile manufacturing families. Instead of entering the family business, Perutz became fascinated with chemistry and began studying it in 1932 at the University of Vienna. He joined the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University as a doctoral student in 1936. There, he worked under J. D. Bernal, who was engaged in X-ray analysis of protein.

In 1937 Perutz began studying the structure of hemoglobin (the protein molecule that transports oxygen in the blood) using X-ray diffraction. Perutz was fully supported in his research by the new head of the lab, Sir William Lawrence Bragg, a physicist who had shared the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics with his father William for being the first to use X-ray scattering to determine atomic structure of a substance. Bragg secured a Rockefeller Foundation grant for Perutz in 1939 after the Nazis in Austria seized...