Aaron Klug · Science & Medicine
Crystallographic Electron Microscopy
1926, Želva, Lithuania — 2018, Cambridge, England, UK
Lithuania · South Africa · United Kingdom (Cambridge)
Aaron Klug is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Crystallographic Electron Microscopy
Origins and early life
Aaron Klug was born in Želva, Lithuania, on 11 August 1926, to Jewish parents — Lazar, a cattleman, and Bella Silin — and was taken to South Africa at the age of two. He was educated at Durban High School, where Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters turned him towards microbiology, and he belonged to the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair. He began in microbiology, moved to physics and mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand, and took a master's at Cape Town before a doctorate in England.
Work and career
In 1953 he went to Birkbeck College in London and worked alongside Rosalind Franklin in J. D. Bernal's laboratory, an encounter that gave him a lifelong subject: the structure of viruses, beginning with tobacco mosaic virus. In 1962 he moved to the newly built Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he combined X-ray diffraction with electron microscopy to build three-dimensional pictures of the complexes of nucleic acid and protein that carry heredity. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982 and knighted. He died in Cambridge on 20 November 2018.
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Source: Nobel Prize Chemistry 1982
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Crystallographic Electron Microscopy
Source: Nobel Prize Chemistry 1982
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