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Podcast: Witness History
Episode: Discovering the structure of haemoglobin
Description: What was it in September of 1959 that caused an Austrian scientist to rush out from his lab and buy children's modelling clay?Austrian born Dr Max Perutz had made one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century. For the first time, he could see what a molecule of haemoglobin looked like in 3D. Using lectures and programmes from the BBC archive, Josephine McDermott tells the story of how his fellow Cambridge University students in the UK thought he was “mad” to try and map a molecule made of 10,000 atoms, and the “appalling task” which took 22 years to...