Kendrew, Sir John Cowdery

Sir John Cowdery Kendrew, (born March 24, 1917, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England—died August 23, 1997, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire), British biochemist who determined the three-dimensional structure of the muscle protein myoglobin, which stores oxygen in muscle cells. For his achievement he shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Max Ferdinand Perutz in 1962.

Kendrew was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, receiving his Ph.D. there in 1949. In 1946–47 he and Perutz founded the Medical Research Council Unit for Molecular Biology at Cambridge. They used the technique of X-ray crystallography to study the structures of proteins, with Perutz studying hemoglobin and Kendrew trying to determine the structure of the somewhat simpler molecule of myoglobin. By 1960, with the use of special diffraction techniques and the help of computers to analyze the X-ray data, Kendrew was able to devise a three-dimensional model of the arrangement of the amino acid units in the myoglobin molecule, which was the first time this had been accomplished for any protein.

A fellow of Peterhouse College, Cambridge, from 1947 to 1975, Kendrew was also deputy chairman of the Medical Research Council Unit and, from 1971, chairman of the Defence Scientific Advisory Council. He was knighted in 1974 and became president of St. John’s College, Oxford, in 1981.