John Cowdery Kendrew
Kendrew, John Cowdery (1917–1997), a British biochemist and physicist, was the first scientist to determine in detail the atomic structure of myoglobin, a complex muscle protein molecule. For this achievement he was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in chemistry with his collaborator Max Ferdinand Perutz.
Kendrew was born in Oxford, England, and attended Trinity College in Cambridge, from which he graduated in chemistry in 1939. Because of the outbreak of World War II (1939–1945), Kendrew postponed further study and joined the armed forces, where he served mostly in Southeast Asia.
During this time, Kendrew met two men who would later influence the path of his own scientific endeavors: physicist John Desmond Bernal and physical chemist Linus Carl Pauling, who was working with proteins.
Kendrew returned to Cambridge after the war and began his doctoral work under Max Ferdinand Perutz, a former student of Bernal. In 1947, the government funded a lab for Perutz and Kendrew, from which evolved the current Laboratory of Molecular Biology. In the course of his doctoral work, Kendrew became most interested in examining proteins and gained much valuable experience with X-ray techniques. After receiving his Ph.D. degree in 1949, he focused his study on understanding the structure of myoglobin, the molecule responsible for conducting oxygen through muscle tissue. Little had previously been understood about myoglobin, but Kendrew's painstaking research finally revealed its complex structure and opened up the study of enzymes.
After receiving his 1962 Nobel Prize in chemistry, Kendrew continued to study myoglobin and accrued many more distinguished awards and honorary fellowships. He received the Order of the British Empire in 1963 and was knighted in 1974.