Aaron Klug

Aaron Klug was born on 11 August 1926 in Zel’va, Białystok Voivodeship, Republic of Poland to Jewish parents Lazar and Bella. His father was a cattleman, trained as a saddler. He also used to write articles for newspapers. The family moved to South Africa when Aaron was a toddler.

He attended Durban High School where he read a book called ‘Microbe Hunters’ by Paul de Kruif, which influenced his interest in microbiology. After school he joined the University of the Witwatersrand from where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree. He then studied for his Master of Science degree at the University of Cape Town.

A brilliant student, he was awarded an 1851 Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. He moved to England on the basis of this scholarship and completed his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1953.

He moved to Birkbeck College in the University of London in late 1953 and started working with Rosalind Franklin in John Bernal's lab where he worked with viruses. At the lab he made important discoveries in the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus.

He developed his own techniques of crystallographic electron microscopy, whereby series of electron micrographs, taken of two-dimensional crystals from different angles, can be combined to produce three-dimensional images of particles.

In 1958, Aaron Klug became director of the Virus Structure Research Group at Birkbeck. After serving there for four years he returned to Cambridge as a staff member of the Medical Research Council in 1962.

He spent the next decade using methods from X-ray diffraction, microscopy and structural modeling 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.

Later, he worked on exposing the structure of the DNA-protein complex, chromatin. In 1974, along with his collaborators, Klug became the first to collect crystals of a transfer RNA and determine its structure.

Aaron Klug is best known for his work on Electron crystallography, a method to determine the arrangement of atoms in solids using a transmission electron microscope (TEM). He performed electron crystallographic studies on inorganic crystals using high-resolution electron microscopy (HREM) in 1978.