Walter Gratzer

Walter Gratzer (1932–2021) arrived in England as a child refugee from Nazism, without speaking English, and became one of the most successful and influential science writers. His principal career was in molecular biophysics at King’s College London, researching the structure of nucleic acids and proteins.

Walter B. Gratzer (1932–2021) was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), in a Jewish family of a German father, Hans Grätzer, and a Hungarian mother, Margit Perlstein. The family lived in a small town in the region of Katowice, Poland. Fleeing the Nazis, they first moved to Czechoslovakia, and in 1939, to England. Most of Gratzer’s extended family were murdered in the Holocaust. 

Scholarships helped him to study at Oxford University. He started in chemistry when the future (1956) Nobel laureate Cyril Hinshelwood was the professor there. Gratzer learned spectroscopy from Richard Barrow and worked on the analysis of the emission spectrum of carbon monoxide. After two years of national service, in 1957, he started work at the National Institute of Medical Research in North London. 

He researched hemoglobin and obtained his Ph.D. in 1960. He then spent a postdoctoral stint at Harvard University. Paul Doty was his mentor, and Gratzer worked on protein structure and stability. He built a rudimentary circular dichroism device for the study of helices and coils. His friendship with James D. Watson dated from their meeting at Harvard in the early 1960s. Later, he helped Watson to produce his book, A Passion for DNA. 

Upon his return to the U.K., Gratzer joined King’s College, University of London, in 1963 and was a member of its biophysics section. First, he was an associate of the College and later of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Biophysics Unit. Eventually, he became a Professor at King’s College and a member of the MRC Muscle and Cell Motility Unit.