Max Perutz was an avid letter writer, so much so that his correspondence provides the autobiography he never wrote. Edited by his daughter Vivien, What a Time I Am Having: Selected Letters of Max Perutz chronicles Perutz's adventurous life through his own vivid, erudite, and humorous pen. These letters document the hopes, roadblocks, and moments of elation in his sixty-year quest to understand the molecular biology of hemoglobin. The first great step in this quest — unraveling the molecular structure of hemoglobin — earned Perutz the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Narrated against a backdrop of family and friends, politics and war, literature, travels, and Max's beloved mountains, these letters provide rare insight into the thoughts of a unique scientist. Starting with charming letters to a girlfriend written in his youth in Vienna and the impressions of a young scientist in Cambridge, the letters progress to the desperate pleas of an "enemy alien" interned in Canada during World War II. The diary of Max's subsequent super-secret war work for the British to build a floating ice airstrip in the North Atlantic, ardent campaigning letters to scientists and politicians, and self-deprecating stories of his own mishaps written to amuse his children and grandchildren are some of the many highlights of these fascinating letters. This book is a companion to Georgina Ferry's Max Perutz and the Secret of Life. Together these volumes provide a vivid portrait of an extraordinary character in the development of molecular biology.

Max Perutz was an avid letter writer, so much so that his correspondence provides the autobiography he never wrote. Edited by his daughter Vivien, What a Time I Am Having: Selected Letters of Max Perutz chronicles Perutz's adventurous life through his own vivid, erudite, and humorous pen. These letters document the hopes, roadblocks, and moments of elation in his sixty-year quest to understand the molecular biology of hemoglobin. The first great step in this quest — unraveling the molecular structure of hemoglobin — earned Perutz the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Narrated against a backdrop of family and friends, politics and war, literature, travels, and Max's beloved mountains, these letters provide rare insight into the thoughts of a unique scientist. Starting with charming letters to a girlfriend written in his youth in Vienna and the impressions of a young scientist in Cambridge, the letters progress to the desperate pleas of an "enemy alien" interned in Canada during World War II. The diary of Max's subsequent super-secret war work for the British to build a floating ice airstrip in the North Atlantic, ardent campaigning letters to scientists and politicians, and self-deprecating stories of his own mishaps written to amuse his children and grandchildren are some of the many highlights of these fascinating letters. This book is a companion to Georgina Ferry's Max Perutz and the Secret of Life. Together these volumes provide a vivid portrait of an extraordinary character in the development of molecular biology.