Image of the Month

January's cold and frosty image was taken by the molecular biologist Max Perutz in the 1940s, from an ice cave near the Jungfraujoch in the Bernese Oberland, Switzerland. At the time Perutz was working on the structure of ice, particularly in glaciers, and this beautiful image shows the view down the Aletsch Glacier. As Perutz said himself, "I do research on glaciers for the fun of it. I do it because I have a passion for the mountains, for skiing and climbing and for the simple happy companionship they bring you."

Born in Vienna in 1914, Perutz moved to Cambridge in 1936 to study for his PhD, and became part of the crystallography research group. He was interned as an enemy alien at the beginning of the war, and was held in camps in Britain and Canada for 9 months, before he was brought back to the UK, where he continued his research at the Cavendish Laboratory. His knowledge of ice structure came in particularly useful later in the war, when Perutz worked on the project code-named "Habakkuk", to construct an aircraft carrier made from the recently invented mixture of ice and woodpulp known as pykrete (sadly "Habakkuk" never made it beyond the experimental stage).

After the war, Perutz became Chairman of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Whilst there, he and his colleague John Kendrew made the break-through for which Perutz is best-known, discovering the structure of the protein haemoglobin, which transports oxygen in the blood, in 1957. This work resulted in Perutz sharing the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Kendrew.