Zuckerkandl was raised in Vienna, Austria in a household of intellectuals, but his family relocated in 1938 to Paris, and later Algiers, to escape the racial policy of Nazi Germany with respect to Jews.
Zuckerkandl developed a strong interest in molecular problems; his early research at a marine biology lab in Roscoff emphasized the roles of copper oxidases and hemocyanin in the molting cycles of crabs.
[3] Zuckerkandl's first project under Pauling (working with graduate student Richard T. Jones) was the application of new protein identification techniques—a combination of paper chromatography and electrophoresis that produced a two-dimensional pattern—to hemoglobin.
However, the method was not conducive to quantitative comparisons, so Zuckerkandl began working on the determination of the actual peptide sequence of the α and β chains of human and gorilla hemoglobin.
Though the paper did not provide any explanation for why amino acid differences in a protein should accumulate at a uniform rate (the essential assumption of the molecular clock), it did show that the results were fairly consistent with those of paleontologists.