At the new Diamond Light Source synchrotron or super microscope' at Harwell, scientists are using light beams 10 billion times brighter than the sun to look deep into the basic structure of matter. Their findings will underpin the development of a new generation of drugs designed to cure disease without damaging healthy cells.

Oxford-based science writer Georgina Ferry's biography Max Perutz and the Secret of Life reminds us what today's cutting-edge science owes to the vision and sheer persistence of the pioneering molecular biologists of the 1950s and 60s.

One of the most important was Cambridge University scientist Perutz. He is remembered both for his own ground-breaking research on haemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the bloodstream around our body, which won him the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1962, and as a generous mentor to generations of scientists at Cambridge's Medical Research Council Laboratory for Molecular Biology. His colleagues included Francis Crick and James Watson, who discovered the structure of DNA.

With synchrotrons and powerful computers, it is now possible to discover the structure of an unknown protein in a matter of days or hours. But it took Perutz 22 years to solve the structure of haemoglobin, because he had to rely on very basic tools.

"When Max started using X-rays he used a little glass tube you had to twiddle," said Georgina. Undeterred by the difficulties inherent in trying to see the structure of a molecule so small that a million and a half of them fit into a single red blood cell, he kept trying out different approaches and using new technology, including the first computers, as it became available. His conviction that understanding the three-dimensional structure of molecules would help us understand how they worked, was, ultimately, proved to be absolutely right.

Perutz's love of science was so all-consuming that he worked right up to his death in 2002 at the age of 87, and never got round to writing his memoirs. He contacted Georgina when he was in hospital, the month before he died, to ask if she would like to write his biography. He had admired her 1998 book about his colleague and friend, Oxford-based protein crystallographer and Nobel Prize-winner Dorothy Hodgkin. Georgina found her hospital visit an uplifting rather than a sad occasion: "He was in a wonderfully serene frame of mind."

After his death, she began piecing together the story of his extraordinary life, travelling to the US, Italy, France - and Austria, Perutz's birthplace - to consult archives and interview his peers and the younger scientists he mentored. Another source proved more important still, paradoxically because it was not intended for posterity: "For a biographer, it's the letters that reveal people as they really are. If the real person comes through, it's because I've been able to quote so extensively from his personal letters," she said.

The book follows all the setbacks and successes of Perutz's long scientific career, from having to admit that a cherished theory was completely wrong to going to collect his Nobel Prize feeling "happy as a lark". However, Georgina said: "What really captivated me was how much more there was to him as an individual." So, interwoven with the scientific narrative are stories about his family, love of the arts, and passion for skiing and climbing mountains, as well as his experiences in the Second World War.

Perutz originally went to Cambridge in the 1930s to study. Hitler's annexation of Austria by Germany made it impossible for him to return, because of his Jewish ancestry. He became a refugee, one of many eminent 20th-century scientists who fled continental Europe at this time. "The contribution that refugees have made is something very important that came out of this story," says the author.

In 1940 he was interned as an enemy alien' and deported to Canada, a frustrating and upsetting experience. Eight months later he was released, returned to Britain, and invited to work on a bizarre - and doomed - aspect of the war effort called Project Habbakuk: a plan to construct aircraft carriers out of strengthened ice called pykrete.

Georgina uncovered stories of secret experiments in an underground cold store beneath Smithfield Market in London, Perutz going by train to Cambridge with a pykrete-filled thermos flask borrowed from Churchill, and a brigadier testing the substance by shooting his pistol at it.

Her many years' experience writing about science for the general reader has enabled Georgina to explain the complex ideas in this book very lucidly. Of writing biographies of scientists, she said: "I love the combination of the literary side of it and the adventure that is science. There is a widespread belief that science is boring or impenetrable, when it isn't at all."

Max Perutz and the Secret of Life, by Georgina Ferry, is published by Chatto & Windus at £25.