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Back in his laboratory, Perutz returned to hemoglobin and worked until 1953 "just finding a way (the mercury technique) to attack the problem." But there were important byproducts along the way. Working under Perutz at Cambridge in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of dioxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the heredity-determining master molecule of life. By 1959, Perutz himself had partially solved the more complicated structure of hemoglobin, locating the sites where iron atoms pick up oxygen. That feat won him a Nobel Prize in 1962.
Atomic Anatomy. Despite his elegant display before the Royal Society, Perutz has far from completed his work on hemoglobin. The model, he points out, shows the structure of hemoglobin only while it is carrying oxygen. To better understand the variable nature of the molecule, he must now build another model that shows its deoxygenated state. Perhaps then Perutz will be able to explain just how the very presence of oxygen causes the molecule to change shape. "What we have done," he says, "is merely the anatomy at the atomic level. Now it is necessary to advance to the physiology."