Klug, Sir Aaron (1926-2018), a Lithuanian-born British scientist, made important advances in electron microscopy, the technique of using electrons rather than light waves to produce magnified images (see Electron microscope ). Klug used electron microscopy to study viruses and molecules that play roles in living cells. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1982 for this work.
Klug was born on Aug. 11, 1926, in Zelvas, Lithuania, but lived in Durban, South Africa, from the age of 2. There, he acquired British Dominion citizenship through his father’s naturalization. He studied at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and later did postgraduate work at the University of Cape Town, where he was influenced by R. W. James, an X-ray crystallographer. X-ray crystallographers study the arrangement of atoms in crystals by analyzing how the crystals diffract x rays (see X rays (In crystal research) ). In 1949, Klug moved to England to work as a research student in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. He then moved to Birkbeck College, London, where he worked on the X-ray analysis of biological molecules. Klug worked with Rosalind Franklin, who was already using X-ray crystallography to study the virus that causes the plant disease tobacco mosaic (see Mosaic disease ). The team to which Klug belonged worked out the structure of the virus over a four-year period.
In 1961, when South Africa became a republic, Klug switched to British citizenship. In 1962, Klug moved to the Medical Research Council’s new Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge. He served as the laboratory’s director from 1986 to 1996. He improved techniques of electron crystallography, in which electrons play the role that X rays play in X-ray crystallography. All fundamental particles behave like waves in certain circumstances, and electrons behave like waves of very short wavelength, permitting detail to be seen at the atomic level. Klug also studied ribonucleic acid (RNA), a molecule that helps to translate genetic instructions in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) into proteins. He discovered the structure of chromatin, the substance of which chromosomes are composed. Klug was knighted in 1988. He was president of the Royal Society, one of the world’s oldest scientific organizations, from 1995 to 2000. Klug died on Nov. 20, 2018.
