Sir Aaron Klug was born in 1926 in Zelvas, Lithuania. At the age of two his family emigrated to Durban, South Africa. He attended Durban Boys School and following his matric was awarded a scholarship to the University of Witwatersrand to study for a BSc, followed by an MSc at the University of Cape Town.
An 1851 Exhibition Scholarship and a research studentship funded a move to Trinity College in Cambridge, England in 1949. He stayed at Cambridge until 1953 where he obtained the Nuffield Fellowship and joined J D Bernal's department at Birkbeck College where he worked on the Tobacco Mosaic Virus.
In 1962, Sir Aaron Klug moved to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge under Max Perutz and was introduced to electron microscopy, developing techniques for 3D electron microscopy and X-ray tomography. In 1969, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Klug was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1982 for "his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes". Following this, he discovered the zinc finger family of transcription factors, which became a major part of his later research. He was made Director of the MRC laboratory in 1986, a position he held for 10 years, and was awarded a knighthood in 1988.
In the 1990s he worked with the Wellcome Trust to found the Sanger Centre for mapping the human Genome. In the mid 90s, Klug and colleagues at the MRC solved the 3D structure of the hammerhead ribozyme. His prominence led to his election as the President of the Royal Society in 1995 and he used his tenure to raise awareness of global warming.
Klug married Liebe Bobrow and had two sons, Adam and David, born in 1954 and 1963.
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