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John Kendrew was born in Oxford in 1917 and educated at Clifton College, Bristol, where an outstanding chemistry teacher inspired him, and from 1936 at Trinity College, Cambridge. After graduating in 1939 he began working for a PhD in physical chemistry, but the war diverted him to radar and later to operational research. He ended the war as adviser to Lord Mountbatten’s South Eastern Command in Ceylon. In 1946 he became a research student of Max Perutz in what became in 1947, the MRC Unit for Molecular Structure of Biological Systems in the Cavendish Laboratory. After an initial X-ray diffraction comparison of crystals of adult and foetal haemoglobin, Kendrew took up the problem of myoglobin which, being a quarter the size of haemoglobin, seemed a more hopeful candidate for X-ray study. His first source, horse heart, however, provided little material and grew poor crystals, but Kendrew realised that diving mammals offered a better prospect since a tenth of their dry muscle weight is myoglobin - used as an oxygen store. The myoglobin from a chunk of sperm whale meat yielded large crystals which gave beautiful diffraction patterns. In 1953 Perutz showed that the phases of the diffracted rays could be found by comparing the patterns from crystals of the protein with and without heavy atoms attached to it. Kendrew found ways of attaching heavy atoms and in 1957 was able to build a rough molecular model and, in 1959, an atomic model - the first of any protein. |
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 Model of the myoglobin molecule, derived from the 2Å Fourier synthesis. The white cord follows the course of the polypeptide chain; the iron atom is indicated by a grey sphere, and its associated water molecule by a white sphere. |
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The Unit moved to the newly built MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 1962, with Kendrew as Deputy Chairman. In 1963 he became one of the founders of the European Molecular Biology Organisation, and in 1974, after four years of skilful diplomacy, he persuaded governments to build the European Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Heidelberg and became its first Director-General. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1960, awarded the CBE in 1963, and knighted in 1974. He founded, and for many years was Editor-in-Chief of, the Journal of Molecular Biology. He died in August 1997 in Cambridge aged 80. |
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