Aaron Klug

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Aaron Klug, 1979

Sir Aaron Klug , OM (* 11. August 1926 in Želva now ukmergė district municipality , district Vilnius , Lithuania ; † 20th November 2018 in Cambridge , UK ) was a British biochemist , molecular biologist of South African origin and Nobel laureate .

Life

Aaron Klug was the son of Bella Silin Klug and Lazar Klug, a Lithuanian cattle dealer. Secondary sources often give Johannesburg , South Africa as the place of birth, but according to his own autobiographical information, Klug was born in the Lithuanian town of Želva. When he was two years old, the family emigrated to Durban , South Africa. Here Aaron attended high school and took an early interest in science. He was particularly fascinated by the book Microbe Hunter by Paul de Kruif . After a pre-medical semester, Klug began studying medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He also enrolled in chemistry, mathematics and physics. He completed his basic studies in 1945, then switched to a master’s degree in physics at the University of Cape Town . He wrote his diploma thesis at RW James on X-ray structure studies on crystals.

In 1949 the Klug family moved to England, where the scientist got a job at the Cavendish Laboratory . However, his hope of working in the research team of Max Perutz and John Kendrew was not fulfilled, so that Klug began investigating the molecular structure of steel and wrote his doctoral thesis on this topic. In 1953 he managed to move to Birkbeck College in London, where he worked with Rosalind Franklin in John Bernal's group. Franklin is considered to be a co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA . In this college, Klug was able to investigate the structure of viruses using X-rays in years of research , in particular he succeeded in clearing up the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus . After Rosalind Franklin's death, Aaron Klug and Kenneth Holmes were able to continue their research on virus structures and finally work on the new branch of crystallographic electron microscopy . When the British Medical Research Council set up a new molecular biology laboratory in Cambridge, Klug moved to this research facility. In 1986 Klug, who is now recognized worldwide as an expert in the field of x-ray structure examinations of viruses, was appointed director of this laboratory.

Aaron Klug had been married to Liebe Bobrow, a choreographer, since 1948. The two have two sons, Adam (* 1954) and David (* 1963).

Klug was Professor of Molecular Biology at the Institute for Medical Research at Cambridge University .

Awards

In 1982 Klug received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of crystallographic electron microscopy and the study of the structure of biologically important nucleic acid - protein complexes. In his Nobel Prize speech he remembered Rosalind Franklin , whose research assistant he was and whose X-ray diffraction diagrams had made a significant contribution to the decoding of DNA.

The British Crown made him a Knight Bachelor in 1988 and awarded him the Order of Merit in 1995 .

In 1969, Klug was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1973 he received the Leeuwenhoek Medal from the Royal Society . The Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences honored him in 1979 with the HP Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics and Columbia University in 1981 with the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize . In 1984 he was elected a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences . Since 1990 he has been a full member of the Academia Europaea and since 1996 of the American Philosophical Society .

literature

  • Nobel Prizes. Chronicle of outstanding achievements , Brockhaus, Mannheim - Leipzig 2001, ISBN 3-7653-0491-3 . Detailed description of the discovery of the protein double disk of the tobacco mosaic virus, the elaboration of crystallographic electron microscopy and the focus on the structure of chromatin . Pp. 798-799.
  • Kenneth Holmes: Aaron Klug (1926-2018). In: nature. December 12, 2018, accessed December 21, 2018 .

Web links

Commons : Aaron Klug  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d homepage with detailed biographical information about Aaron Klug (English); Retrieved April 5, 2010
  2. ^ Aaron Klug - Biographical. Nobelprize.org, accessed April 8, 2016 .
  3. ↑ Knights and Dames: KIN − LYV at Leigh Rayment's Peerage, accessed on January 14, 2019.
  4. ^ American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Book of Members ( PDF ). Retrieved April 18, 2016
  5. ^ Member Directory: Aaron Klug. (No longer available online.) National Academy of Sciences, archived from the original on January 3, 2018 ; accessed on January 2, 2018 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nasonline.org
  6. ^ Membership directory: Aaron Klug. Academia Europaea, accessed January 2, 2018 .
  7. ^ Member History: Sir Aaron Klug. American Philosophical Society, accessed November 19, 2018 (with biographical notes).
personal data
SURNAME Smart, Aaron
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British biochemist and molecular biologist
DATE OF BIRTH August 11, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Želva , Vilnius District , Lithuania
DATE OF DEATH 20th November 2018
Place of death Cambridge , UK