The life story of Max Protz, the Jewish scientist who escaped from Nazi Austria, revolutionized the study of protein structure, and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for deciphering the structure of hemoglobin — alongside his engagement with moral questions about science, war, and the figure of Fritz Haber.
Max Ferdinand Protz was born in the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna, on May 19, 1914, a few months before the outbreak of World War I. His parents were wealthy Jews, his father owned a textile factory in Bohemia, and his mother was a member of a family of textile manufacturers named Goldschmidt. At the age of nine, Max was sent to an elite school in Vienna, but he himself later testified: "I was a bad student in high school. […] . I was unhappy that I had no talent for anything—not Latin, not mathematics, not dancing, not music, not even football. In addition, I was short-sighted and sleepy and spoke slowly."
A little later, his mother instilled in him a love of skiing, and at the age of sixteen he won the school skiing competitions. "That was the first time I was treated with respect at school," recalls Perot. Since then, the sports teacher gave him the highest mark, but these were his only excellent grades. The subject that attracted him at school was chemistry. The parents wanted Max to support the family business and go to study law, but chemistry was more interesting, and he became a student at the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Vienna.
At university, Max was fascinated by the work of the British physician and biochemist from Cambridge University, Frederick Holland Hopkins, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Hopkins showed that all chemical reactions in living cells are catalyzed by enzymes and that all enzymes are proteins. But the question arose: "How do these enzymes work?" We had no idea. They were black boxes," Protz later wrote. Max decided to continue his research at Cambridge, but the work with Hopkins did not work out. Protz ended up in the laboratory of Nobel Prize winner in Physics William Henry Bragg.
In 1938, the Anschluss occurred: Austria was swallowed up by Nazi Germany. Peretz's parents, as Jews, fled to Switzerland, lost all their money and could no longer support their son financially. But Bragg helped Max obtain a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation, with which Peretz completed his dissertation, and moved his parents to Britain.
Because protein crystals were difficult to obtain, Protz chose one of the easiest proteins to crystallize—horse hemoglobin. Most of his career was associated with this protein, which transports oxygen.
At the beginning of World War II, Perotz was interned with other people of German or Austrian origin and sent to Canada on Churchill's orders. Perotz recalled: "I was desperately unhappy. I had been rejected by my own country as a Jew. Now I found myself rejected by my own country as an enemy." But after a few months he was returned to Cambridge, where, with Bragg's help, he resumed his research on molecular systems. Perotz was a pioneer in the use of X-ray crystallography to study the structure of proteins, and he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962 with John Candrow for his work on the structure of hemoglobin. He was director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, which from the 1950s had produced nine Nobel Prize winners, perhaps most famously James Watson and Francis Crick, who discovered the double helix structure of DNA in 1953.
In 1998, Protz published a collection of essays on scientists and science called I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier: Essays on Science, Scientists, and Humanity.
Among these articles was the article "Friend or Foe of Mankind?" about Fritz Haber, in which he attempted to decipher the "hemoglobin molecule structure" of world history using Haber's example.
In 1919, the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the German scientist Fritz Haber "for the synthesis of ammonia from its components." Scientists from the Allied powers strongly protested the decision of the Swedish Academy. They declared Haber a war criminal who had taken part in the creation of chemical weapons.
Fritz Haber, a converted Jew, professor at the Kaiser Institute and the University of Berlin, and member of the prestigious Prussian Academy of Sciences, made one of the most important discoveries in the history of world agriculture on the eve of World War I.
One of the main dangers facing humanity at that time was considered to be "nitrogen starvation." Rapid population growth in European countries required a constant increase in soil fertility, that is, an increasing amount of nitrogen fertilizers. Their only natural source was the Chilean salt deposits, and they were to run out in the coming decades, which was to lead to famine in Germany.
In August 1914, World War I began and a naval blockade was imposed on Germany. The military experts of the Allied powers thought that without nitrogen, the Germans would not be able to produce nitric acid, which was the basis for fertilizers and explosives. Then the production of fertilizers, explosives and gunpowder would cease, the munitions factories would close, and the Germans would be left without ammunition and bullets. Six months later, Germany would collapse militarily and famine would ensue.
But the blockade did not paralyze the German military industry and did not lead it to starvation and military defeat. The country was saved by the Jew Fritz Haber. Even before the war, Haber invented a method for synthesizing ammonia from hydrogen and atmospheric air at high pressures. By acidifying ammonia obtained from the air, nitric acid, fertilizers, and explosives were produced. He fed millions of people thanks to nitrogen fertilizers and killed tens of thousands of people using chemical weapons.
On April 22, 1915, Haber first used a poisonous substance – chlorine gas – against French soldiers near the small town of Ypres in Belgium: according to German reports, five thousand died on the spot and ten thousand were injured and disabled. In 1916, he was appointed head of the military chemical services of the German army. Haber was the first example in history of a scientist using scientific achievements for the mass extermination of people. In the Weimar Republic, Haber enjoyed great respect as a great scientist, a prominent organizer, an influential politician and a great German patriot.
In an article on the bar, Protz wrote about the historical significance of his central discovery, ammonia synthesis: "Without this invention, Germany would have been left without explosives. The planned "blitzkrieg" against France would have ended in failure. The war would have ended much earlier, and millions of young people would not have been killed. Under these conditions, Lenin would never have come to Russia, perhaps Hitler would not have come to power, perhaps the Holocaust would not have occurred, and European civilization from Gibraltar to the Urals would have been saved."
Millions of people might not have been killed. Germany would not have had to finance and inject Lenin into Russia to organize a revolution there and get the country out of the war. Perhaps, if Lenin had not come to Russia, the February 1917 revolution would not have become the Bolshevik revolution, and the entire history of Russia could have developed in a different direction. Perhaps Germany would not have reached a state of complete destruction, devastation and terrible humiliation following the Treaty of Versailles after its shameful and total defeat in the war. Perhaps history could have developed differently if the Jew Fritz Haber had not been such a great German patriot.
Despite his enormous contribution to Germany, after the Nazis came to power, Haber had to leave that country. The blood that flowed in his veins, the structure of which was deciphered by Protz, severed Haber's relationship with his homeland. Albert Einstein, his old friend, eulogized Haber with the following words: "Haber's life was the tragedy of the German Jew - the tragedy of unrequited love."
Perot died in Cambridge on February 6, 2002.
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Please delete the accented "PA" at the beginning of the name Ferdinand.