The answer came, in part, thanks to a massive physical model of the protein deoxyhemoglobin (hemoglobin not yet bonded to oxygen) that was meticulously assembled over six years by Japanese-American ...

By 1959, Perutz himself had partially solved the more complicated structure of hemoglobin, locating the sites where iron atoms pick up oxygen. That feat won him a Nobel Prize in 1962. Atomic Anatomy.

The atomic structure of hemoglobin, determined by Max Perutz and colleagues 4, showed that this residue position is located on the surface of the protein.

Max Perutz is renowned for discovering the structure of hemoglobin. He and his colleagues disclosed the tetrameric structure of methemoglobin in 1970, 33 years after he had set himself that task ...