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Aaron Klug was born in 1926 in Lithuania, but in 1928 his family emigrated to Durban, South Africa, and he was educated at Durban High School. Reading “Microbe Hunters” by Paul de Kruif influenced him to begin medicine at university as a way into microbiology. At the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg he took the pre-medical course, and in the second year, among other subjects, biochemistry. However, feeling the lack of a deeper foundation, he moved to chemistry and thence to physics and mathematics, and so to a science degree. Deciding to do physics research he went to the University of Cape Town to do an MSc degree under R. W. James, a crystallographer from Bragg’s school in Manchester, and acquired a good knowledge of X-ray diffraction from his own work and by checking the proofs of James’ classic book “The Optical Principles of the Diffraction of X-rays”. In 1949, he came to the Cavendish Laboratory wanting to do some “unorthodox” X-ray crystallography: for example, on proteins with Perutz and Kendrew, but the MRC Unit was full. Instead, his PhD was obtained in solid state physics under D. R. Hartree. In 1954 he moved to Birkbeck College in London where he met Rosalind Franklin. Interest in her work drew him into the study of macromolecular assemblies, initially Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV), and later spherical viruses. After Rosalind’s untimely death he became leader of the Virus group which moved to the new MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 1962. He became joint Head of the Division of Structural Studies in 1978 and Director of the Laboratory in 1986. |
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 The Zinc Fingure Domain. |
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His group continued to work on the structure of viruses and on the assembly of TMV. Close study of electron micrographs of viruses led to the development of quantitative methods for their analysis, leading to general methods for calculating three-dimensional maps of specimens. The interests of his group soon diversified to include work on the structure of DNA and RNA. The crystal structure of tRNA was established in 1974, and recently a hammerhead ribozyme RNA was solved. Analysis of the nucleosome core and higher order structures led to an understanding of how DNA is packed in chromosomes. Work on transcription factor binding to DNA led to the discovery of the zinc finger domain. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1969 and became its President in 1995. He was knighted in 1988 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1995. |
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