David Mervyn Blow (born June 27, 1931 in Birmingham, England; died June 8, 2004 in Appledore, England) was an influential British biophysicist. He was best known for the development of X-ray crystallography, a technique used to determine the molecular structures of tens of thousands of biological molecules. This has been extremely important to the pharmaceutical industry.

As a youth, Blow attended Kingswood school in Bath, England, where he won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. He then spent two years at MIT and the National Institutes of Health. In 1954 he met Max Perutz, and they began to study a new technique wherein X-rays would be passed through a protein sample. This eventually led to the creation of a three-dimensional structure of haemoglobin. He became professor of biophysics at Imperial College in London in 1977.

David Blow married Mavis Sears in 1955, and they had two children. Blow died of lung cancer at the age of 72.

External links

• Biography in the New York Times
• Biography in the Guardian