The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1962 was awarded jointly to Max Ferdinand Perutz and John Cowdery Kendrew "for their studies of the structures of globular proteins".
 

The pattern of regularly spaced dots produced by passing X-rays through crystals is the result of a complex series of reflections and interactions that occur as the X-ray waves bounce off each atom in the crystal. In the early days of X-ray crystallography, researchers mainly worked on simpler compounds containing tens of atoms. However, using the same methods in complex molecules such as proteins, which contain thousands of atoms, proved to be a futile task. Perutz overcame this phase problem by incorporating heavy atoms, namely those of mercury, into specific positions in a protein molecule, without affecting the positions of the other atoms. Using this method Perutz determined the molecular structure of the protein haemoglobin that transports oxygen in the blood, and Kendrew, his colleague at Cambridge University, determined the molecular structure of the smaller, related protein myoglobin.