Aaron Klug (1926–2018) was a Lithuanian-born South African-British biophysicist. This winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is best known for his analyses into the composition of viruses and the development of crystallographic electron microscopy.
Born in Želva, Lithuania, now in Belarus, Klug moved to South Africa as a young child and studied physics at the universities of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and Cape Town. He became a research student in the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge (1949–52) before moving to London to British biophysicist John Bernal’s laboratory at Birkbeck College (1954–57.) There, he worked with crystallographer Rosalind Franklin.
Following Franklin’s death in 1958, Klug became head of the virus structure research group at Birkbeck (1958–61) and returned to Cambridge in 1962 as a Fellow of Peterhouse. He was also a staff member and then director of the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (1986–91.)
Klug’s studies applied a wide variety of techniques, particularly crystallography, to study viruses’ structures. From the 1970s, Klug used these methods to analyze chromosomes and other biological macromolecules such as muscle filaments.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Aaron Klug
Human curiosity, the urge to know, is a powerful force and is perhaps the best secret weapon of all in the struggle to unravel the workings of the natural world.
—Aaron Klug
Topics: Weapon
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Arthur Eddington English Astronomer
Freeman Dyson American Physicist, Author
Ernest Rutherford New Zealand-born Physicist
Peter Medawar British Immunologist, Writer
Michael Faraday British Physicist, Chemist
Humphry Davy British Chemist
Isaiah Berlin British Philosopher, Historian
G. H. Hardy English Mathematician
Paul Dirac English Theoretical Physicist
Isaac Newton English Physicist