The beginnings of structural biology

The Medical Research Council (MRC) had housed the unit for molecular biology in a prefabricated hut on the Old Cavendish laboratory site, off Free School Lane in the center of Cambridge, between about 1957 and 1961.It was a temporary haven for Max Perutz's growing group of structural and molecular biologists, who had outgrown the available space in the Austin Wing of the Cavendish Laboratory (one of the centers of nuclear physics in the days of Lord Rutherford).In spite of all the squalor and overcrowding, I remember the MRC hut with nostalgic affection.The last time I saw the MRC hut, it was being used as a bicycle shed.It was while I was a postdoctoral fellow in Bill Lipscomb's laboratory in Minnesota that I heard a lecture by Dorothy Hodgkin on the investigations by John Kendrew into the structure of sperm whale myoglobin.I was fascinated by the mathematical challenge of solving the 3-dimensional atomic structure of a molecule with a molecular weight of 17,000 Da, but I knew nothing about proteins.My undergraduate degrees were in mathematics and physics, with no chemistry or biology, in accordance with the English tradition of depth at the expense of width.My Ph.D. centered around the structures of synthetic aromatic hydrocarbons in John Monteath Robertson's laboratory ("J.M." was among the first users of Fourier series to represent electron densities), where I had picked up a little background in organic