John C. Kendrew

John C. Kendrew (1917-1997), British molecular biologist, physicist, biochemist, and Nobel Prize winner. Kendrew successfully determined the structure of a protein, a discovery that led to increased knowledge of how living systems function. He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Austrian-born British chemist Max Perutz.

John Cowdery Kendrew was born in Oxford, England, and attended Clifton College in Bristol and Trinity College in Cambridge where he received his B.A. degree in 1939 and his M.A. degree in 1943. He completed his Ph.D. degree in 1949 and his doctor of science degree thirteen years later, both at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. As a doctoral candidate at the Cavendish Laboratory he met Max Perutz, a fellow scientist who was conducting experiments with hemoglobin, a protein in blood that transports oxygen. Perutz's research was strikingly similar to Kendrew's work with myoglobin, a muscle protein.

Kendrew was a fellow of Peterhouse College at Cambridge from 1947 to 1975. Together with Perutz, he founded the Medical Research Council Unit for Molecular Biology at Cambridge in 1947. From 1960 to 1964 he served as scientific advisor to the Ministry of Defense in England.

Kendrew focused his research on blood chemistry, and, with the help of Perutz, pioneered the use of X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of proteins. Proteins, which perform many vital bodily functions, are essential components of all living cells. A protein molecule is a very complicated structure, composed of long polypeptide chains that contain more than 100 amino acids. Kendrew formulated the first three-dimensional structure of the myoglobin protein, which made it possible to determine its structural change as it interacts with other proteins.

Among his other honors, Kendrew was knighted in 1974 and is a fellow of the Royal Society.