During the passage of the controversial immigration legislation in 1992, he approached me, asking to make representations to the then Home Secretary, Kenneth Clarke. Clarke’s reaction, to his credit, was to arrange for Perutz, accompanied by myself and the Secretary of the Refugee Council, Dr Louise Pirouet, to go and see his senior Home Office officials, including Gordon Wasserman, Hugh Gaitskell’s son-in-law, who was then an Assistant Secretary at the Home Office. In a two-hour meeting I could only marvel at the skill displayed by Perutz in conversing – he didn’t argue, he conversed – with the clever and extremely able senior officials of the Home Office who were putting forward the views of the Government. Perutz’s was a performance of knowledge and passion in a subject which people might have thought was far away from biochemistry.But this was the man who could contribute a major essay, “By What Right Do We Invoke Human Rights?”, to the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society in June 1996.

His opening reveals a lot about Perutz: Scientists the world over are united by a common purpose, ideally to discover Nature’s secrets and put them to use for human benefit. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the discoverer of vitamin C, has said: “I feel closer to a Chinese colleague than to my own postman.” When a scientist who has committed no crime is imprisoned, we feel like the minister freeing the prisoners in Fidelio when he sings, “Es sucht der Bruder seine Br?” – he or she is one of our brothers or sisters, and we feel a duty to appeal for his or her release. In doing so, we are now on strong legal grounds established by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the conventions and covenants that followed it. They have the force of international law and are backed by courts and commissions to which individuals can appeal.Perutz in the last decade, through contact with people in public office and many letters to the broadsheet press, campaigned for international law to be upheld in Bosnia, Kosovo, the Gulf and latterly Afghanistan. He was deeply interested in military matters and very well informed.

This may be partly because his first research student, a then young wing commander who came into his office in uniform and asked if he could work for him, was John Kendrew – with whom he was to share a Nobel Prize 16 years later.On 1 August 1994 there appeared one of the most elegantly crafted obituaries ever penned for a broadsheet newspaper. It was Perutz’s tribute in The Independent to Professor Dorothy Hodgkin. The final paragraph read thus: Dorothy Hodgkin’s uncanny knack of solving difficult structures came from a combination of manual skill, mathematical ability and profound knowledge of crystallography and chemistry. It often led her and her alone to recognise what the initially blurred maps emerging from X-ray analysis were trying to tell. She will be remembered as a great chemist, a saintly, gentle and tolerant lover of people and a devoted protagonist of peace.Max Perutz’s description of his friend fits himself perfectly.. Mind that hedge trimmer! And watch what you’re doing with that high-risk wallpaper stripper.

If you thought that it was just Eminem and the characters in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre who got into trouble with power tools, you obviously haven’t been reading Which? magazine lately.For it seems that even the most innocuous seeming pieces of machinery in the most responsible hands can wreak havoc and mayhem. The Which? survey suggests that unsafe tools are being hired out to unsuspecting DIY enthusiasts. Apparently, outlets are putting lives at risk by supplying unsafe equipment and not providing necessary advice. More than a quarter of tools hired by Which? researchers had safety problems, with six so dangerous that they were sent straight to trading standards officers.This is an appalling state of affairs. Just imagine the damage that could be done to national institutions such as Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen or Carol Smillie by a dodgy sander that suddenly went out of control.The nation’s DIYers, renovators and builders have been warned by the consumer lobby. Treat those power tools of death with the greatest circumspection.. For weeks, Australia has rebuffed foreign critics of its treatment of asylum-seekers with a characteristically robust mixture of condemnation and disdain.