Aaron Klug

Sir Aaron Klug (11 August 1926 – 20 November 2018) was a British biophysicist and chemist who won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was recognised for creating crystallographic electron microscopy and for determining the structures of important complexes formed between nucleic acids and proteins.

Klug was born in Želva, Lithuania, to Jewish parents Lazar and Bella Klug. When he was two, the family moved to South Africa. He attended Durban High School and became interested in microbiology after reading Paul de Kruif's *Microbe Hunters*. He was involved with the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth movement. Initially studying microbiology, he switched to physics and mathematics, earning a Bachelor of Science from the University of the Witwatersrand. He studied physics under Reginald W. James and obtained a Master of Science from the University of Cape Town. An 1851 Research Fellowship allowed him to move to England, where he completed a PhD in research physics at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1953.

After his PhD, Klug joined Birkbeck College in late 1953, working with Rosalind Franklin in John Bernal's lab. This sparked a lasting interest in viruses, and he made discoveries about the tobacco mosaic virus's structure. In 1962, he moved to the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Over the next decade, he combined X-ray diffraction, microscopy, and structural modelling to develop crystallographic electron microscopy, which merges two-dimensional crystal images taken from multiple angles into three-dimensional reconstructions. He studied transfer RNA structure, identified zinc fingers, and investigated neurofibrils in Alzheimer's disease. Also in 1962, he became a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, later an Honorary Fellow. He directed the LMB from 1986 to 1996, served on the Advisory Council for the Campaign for Science and Engineering, and sat on the Board of Scientific Governors at The Scripps Research Institute. With Dai Rees, he approached the Wellcome Trust to establish the Wellcome Sanger Institute, a key contributor to the Human Genome Project.

Klug received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize in 1981 and was knighted in 1988. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1969 and served as its President from 1995 to 2000. In 1995, he was appointed to the Order of Merit, customary for Royal Society presidents. His election certificate described him as a mathematical physicist and crystallographer distinguished for contributions to molecular biology, especially virus structure. It noted his development of a theory of simultaneous temperature and phase changes in steels, which he applied to gas diffusion and chemical reactions in haemoglobin layers and red blood cells. Rosalind Franklin introduced him to X-ray studies of tobacco mosaic virus, where he applied and extended Cochran and Crick's diffraction theory for helical molecules. His most important work concerned spherical viruses: with D. Caspar, he developed a general theory of spherical shells built from regular arrays of asymmetric particles, which he and collaborators verified with X-ray and electron microscopy, revealing new virus features. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In 2000, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 2005, he was awarded South Africa's Order of Mapungubwe (gold) and elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. In 2013, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev dedicated its Aaron Klug Integrated Centre for Biomolecular Structure in his name, with Klug, his family, and the British Ambassador in attendance. He had a long association with the university and the town of Be'er Sheva.

Klug married Liebe Bobrow in 1948; they had two sons, one of whom died before them in 2000. He died on 20 November 2018 in Cambridge. Despite facing discrimination in South Africa, he remained religious, and according to Sydney Brenner, became more so in later life.