Aaron Klug
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Sir Aaron Klug OM FRS |
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Aaron Klug in 1979
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| Born |
11 August 1926 Želva, Lithuania |
| Nationality | British |
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| Thesis | The kinetics of phase changes in solids (1953) |
| Doctoral advisor | Douglas Hartree |
| Known for | Crystallographic electron microscopy |
| Notable awards |
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| Spouse | Liebe Bobrow (m. 1948) |
| Children | Two |
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Website www2 |
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Sir Aaron Klug OM HonFRMS PRS (born 11 August 1926) is a Lithuanian-born British chemist and biophysicist, and winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.
Klug was born in Želva to Jewish parents Lazar, a cattleman, and Bella (née Silin) Klug with whom he moved to South Africa at the age of two. He was educated at Durban High School. He later graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree at the University of the Witwatersrand and studied for his Master of Science degree at the University of Cape Town before he was awarded an 1851 Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, which enabled him to move to England, completing his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1953.
Following his PhD, Klug moved to Birkbeck College in the University of London in late 1953, and started working with Rosalind Franklin in John Bernal's lab. This experience aroused a lifelong interest in the study of viruses, and during his time there he made discoveries in the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. In 1962 he moved to the newly built Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge. Over the following decade Klug used methods from X-ray diffraction, microscopy and structural modelling to develop crystallographic electron microscopy in which a sequence of two-dimensional images of crystals taken from different angles are combined to produce three-dimensional images of the target. In 1962 Klug was offered a teaching Fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He went on teaching after his Nobel Prize because he found the courses interesting and was later made an Honorary Fellow at the College.
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