What a time I am having: selected letters of Max Perutz, edited by Vivien Perutz
This book opens with a detailed Preface of four and half pages by Vivien Perutz and, in turn, its opening sentence states ‘My father, Max Perutz, was a prolific letter writer’. All crystallographers will find much to like in this splendid book, not least the personal accounts provided by Max Perutz through the foundation and development of the field of molecular biology. But many other scientists I think will also find interest in its insights on the workings of science and on Max Perutz as a leading figure in this field and beyond. The author, Vivien Perutz, states that ‘My chief problem has not been survival but the selection of excerpts from my father’s voluminous correspondence.’ She also goes on to say that she tried to ensure her parents’ privacy . . . and (thereby), for example, omitted almost all of her father’s frequent references to his health, which was a continual source of anxiety. Eventually a key feature of this was discerned as a need for a gluten free diet. The letters for the period 1932 to 1936 are translated from the German originals. Vivien also decided to exclude the lengthy correspondence on the controversy regarding a Medical Research Council report shown by Max Perutz to Francis Crick regarding the DNA fibre diffraction pattern results of Rosalind Franklin. Although details of this controversy have already featured in a number of existing books, it would have been particularly interesting to hear Max’s views in his own words. Max Perutz was born in 1914 and died in 2002. He was not only a scientist of immense achievement but also a prolific writer. I have read all of his books and enjoyed them enormously. This collection of letters, through the detailed nature of the material, needs more perseverance, I found, but there are rewards for the reader. Unlike his books, these letters were of course not written for publication but for the private information of the recipients – family, friends, fellow scientists, administrators – and provide a less guarded and thus more human and in many ways more interesting viewpoint. The reader is taken on a personal journey, in essence seeing it through Max Perutz’s eyes and perspective. Historial situations, i.e. before my time but reasonably well known to this reviewer as a practising crystallographer, are now in a vista of glorious detail described close in time to when they actually happened. I will highlight one phase and story in detail. The early 1950s featured scientific competition between Max and his colleagues in Cambridge with crystallographers in the USA. Thus I was confronted with the letters (pp. 231–235) sent by Max from Pennsylvania State College in April 1950 to his wife, Gisela, on the occasion of the Conference of the American Society for X-ray and Electron Diffraction (and) Crystallographic Society of America, which became amalgamated into the American Crystallographic Association (ACA). Max describes the Conference timetable being from 9am to 10.30pm with 1.5 hour breaks for lunch and dinner and that ‘people got tired’. In terms of approach ‘There is a sharp contrast between the English crystallographers who do beautiful work in solving