Kendrew, John Cowdery (1917-1997)

English biochemist who shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1962 with his colleague Max Perutz for determining the structure of the muscle protein myoglobin. He was knighted in 1974.

Kendrew was born in Oxford and studied at Cambridge, where he spent most of his academic career. In 1975 he became director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory at Heidelberg, Germany.

In 1946 at Cambridge Kendrew began working with Perutz. Their research centred on the fine structure of various protein molecules; Kendrew was assigned the task of studying myoglobin, a globular protein which occurs in muscle fibres (where it stores oxygen). He used X-ray diffraction techniques to elucidate the amino acid sequence in the peptide chains that form the myoglobin molecule. Early computers were programmed to analyse the X-ray photographs. In 1959 Kendrew founded the Journal of Molecular Biology. By 1960, he had determined the spatial arrangement of all 1,200 atoms in the molecule, showing it to be a folded helical chain of amino acids with an amino (-NH2) group at one end and a carboxylic (-COOH) group at the other. It involves an iron-containing haem group, which allows the molecule to absorb oxygen.