Nationality British Name David Blow Fields Biophysicist Notable awards Royal Society | Doctoral advisor Max Perutz Awards Wolf Prize in Chemistry | |
 | ||
Born 27 June 1931
Birmingham, England ( 1931-06-27 ) Institutions Imperial College London Alma mater Corpus Christi College, Cambridge Died June 8, 2004, Appledore, United Kingdom Books Outline of Crystallography for Biologists Education Kingswood School, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, University of Cambridge Known for Hemoglobin, X-ray crystallography | ||
Other academic advisors Alexander Rich | ||
David Mervyn Blow FRS (27 June 1931 – 8 June 2004) was an influential British biophysicist. He was best known for the development of X-ray crystallography, a technique used to determine the molecular structures of tens of thousands of biological molecules. This has been extremely important to the pharmaceutical industry.
Contents
Early life and education
Blow was born in Birmingham, England. As a youth, he attended Kingswood School in Bath, England, where he won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
Career
Following graduation from Cambridge, Blow spent two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
In 1954, he met Max Perutz; they began to study a new technique wherein X-rays would be passed through a protein sample. This eventually led to the creation of a three-dimensional structure of haemoglobin.
Blow was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1972.
Blow became professor of biophysics at Imperial College London in 1977.
Personal life
Blow married Mavis Sears in 1955, and they had two children.
Blow died of lung cancer at the age of 72, in Appledore, England.