1914-

Austrian-born British biochemist who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in chemistry with John Kendrew for their studies of the structure of the globular proteins hemoglobin and myoglobin. Perutz demonstrated that it was possible to determine the structure of proteins by x-ray diffraction, a technique previously used with much smaller molecules. The key to solving the structure of such a large molecule was developed in 1953 when Perutz succeeded in incorporating mercury atoms into specific positions in the hemoglobin molecule.