Aaron D Klug 1926 - 2018

Aaron Klug made outstanding contributions to the development of structural molecular biology. An early interest in viruses, stemming from work with Rosalind Franklin, prompted him to think deeply about extracting the information contained in electron micrographs. As a result, he proposed a method for making three-dimensional maps of biological specimens from the projected images given by micrographs. For this development and its application to complex molecular assemblies, he was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Aaron Klug was born on 11 August 1926 in the shtetl of Zelva in Lithuania, with his family then emigrating to South Africa in 1927. He went on to study physics at the University of Cape Town, where he gained a deep understanding of x-ray diffraction to calculate the structure of crystals from their diffraction patterns. He went on to carry out research at Cambridge - working on cooling steel, and later on oxygen in diffusion in red blood cells, and he went on to develop a keen interest in protein crystallography. At Cambridge he met Rosalind Franklin, and they collaborated on x-ray diffraction patterns of the tobacco mosaic virus. After Rosalind's death in 1958, Aaron became head of the virus group.

In 1962, Klug moved to the newly opened MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, where he studied the human wart virus. Aaron’s interest soon diversified to include work on the structure of DNA and RNA, and his group was the first to determine a number of key structures. Klug was also instrumental in starting work on neurodegenerative disease at the LMB. His input was central to our understanding of the role of the tau protein in Alzheimer’s disease.

On 11 October 1983 Klug heard that he had won the Nobel prize for chemistry, for ‘his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic-acid complexes’.