Michael G. Rossmann (1930–2019), pioneer in macromolecular and virus crystallography: scientist, mentor and friend

Abstract

Michael George Rossmann, who made monumental contributions to science, passed away peacefully in West Lafayette, Indiana on 14 May 2019 at the age of 88, following a courageous five-year battle with cancer. Michael was born in Frankfurt, Germany on 30 July 1930. As a young boy, he emigrated to England with his mother just as World War II ignited. Michael was a highly innovative and energetic person, well known for his intensity, persistence and focus in pursuing his research goals. Michael was a towering figure in crystallography as a highly distinguished faculty member at Purdue University for 55 years. Michael made many seminal contributions to crystallography in a career that spanned the entirety of structural biology, beginning in the 1950s at Cambridge where the first protein structures were determined in the laboratories of Max Perutz (hemoglobin, 1960) and John Kendrew (myoglobin, 1958). Michael's work was central in establishing and defining the field of structural biology, which amazingly has described the structures of a vast array of complex biological molecules and assemblies in atomic detail. Knowledge of three-dimensional biological structure has important biomedical significance including understanding the basis of health and disease at the molecular level, and facilitating the discovery of many drugs.