I
was born in 1926 to Lazar and Bella (née Silin) Klug in Zelvas, Lithuania,
but remember nothing of the place, because I was brought to South Africa as
a child of two and grew up there. My father was trained as a saddler, but in
fact as a young man worked in his father's business of rearing and selling cattle,
so he grew up in the countryside. He - боковинами полка Focus с 2112 Autobiography Ford Aaron ВАЗ Klug had a traditional Jewish education and
secular schooling, and though
not a conventionally well educated man, he had
some gift for writing, and had a number of articles published in the newspapers
of the capital, for which he acted as what would now be called a stringer. Shortly
after I was born he emigrated to Durban, where members of my mother's family
had settled at the turn of the century, and the rest of the family followed
soon thereafter.
Durban was then a relatively sleepy town in subtropical surroundings. It was
a fine place for a boy - there was the beach and the bush and school was not
too taxing. I went to a good school, Durban High School, which was run on traditional
English lines, with a curriculum somewhat adapted to South African circumstances.
We had some good masters particularly in History and English. However, by the
standards of to-day, there were few challenges other than Advanced Latin Prose
Composition in the 6th Form. The philosophy of the school was quite simple -
the bright boys specialised in Latin, the not so bright in science and the rest
managed with geography or the like. There was a good library but it was the
playing fields that kept one out of mischief. I did not feel a particularly
strong call to any one subject, but read voraciously and widely and began to
find science interesting. It was the book called Microbe Hunters by Paul
de Kruif, well known in Klug Autobiography подстанция КТП Aaron - Трансформаторная its time, which influenced me to begin medicine at university
as a way into microbiology.
At the University of
Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, I took the pre-medical course
and, in my second year, I took, among other subjects, biochemistry, or physiological
chemistry as it was then called, which stood me in good stead in later years
when I came to face biological material. However, I felt the lack of a deeper
foundation, and moved to chemistry and this in turn led me to physics and mathematics.
So finally I took a science degree.
I had by then decided that I wanted to do research in physics and I went to
the University of Cape Town which was then offering scholarships which enabled
one to do an M.Sc. degree, in return for demonstrating in laboratory classes.
The University lay in a beautiful site on the slopes of Table Mountain, which
one climbed at week-ends. I was lucky to find as Professor there, R.W. James,
the X-ray crystallographer, who had brought to Cape Town the traditions of the
Bragg school at Manchester. He was an excellent teacher and I used to attend
his undergraduate lectures as well as those in the M.Sc. course. From him I
acquired a feeling for optics, and a knowledge of Fourier theory, and I remember
particularly certain optical experiments on rather abstruse phenomena such as
external and internal conical refraction which fascinated me. After taking my
M.Sc. degree, I stayed on and worked on the X-ray analysis of some small organic
compounds, in the course of which I developed a method of using molecular structure
factors for solving crystal structures, and taught myself some quantum chemistry
to calculate bond lengths and so on. During this time, I developed a strong
interest, broadly speaking, in the structure of matter, and how it was organised.
I had now acquired a good knowledge of X-ray diffraction, not only through my
own work, but through having helped James check the proofs of his fine book
- The Optical Principles of the Diffraction of X-rays - still a standard
work. James wrote beautifully and fully and took great pains to make everything
clear.
Supported by an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship and also by a research studentship
to Trinity College, I went to Cambridge in 1949. Cambridge was the place for
someone from the Colonies or the Dominions to go on to, and it was to the Cavendish
Laboratory that one went to do physics. I wanted to work on some form of "unorthodox"
X-ray crystallography, for example protein structure, but the MRC Unit where
Perutz and Kendrew were working was full, and Bragg, then the Cavendish Professor,
had closed down a project on order - disorder phenomena in alloys, which interested
me. I finally found myself a research student of D.R. Hartree, who had been
a colleague of both
Bragg and James at Manchester. He suggested to me a theoretical
problem left over from his work during the war on the cooling of steel through
the austenite-pearlite transition, and I learned a fair amount of metallurgy
in order to understand the physical basis of the phenomenon. It turned out however
in the end that it was not special crystallographic insight that was called
for - the course of the transition was in practice governed by the diffusion
of the latent heat and I ended up using numerical methods to solve the partial
differential equations for heat flow in the presence of a phase transition.
I learned a good deal during this time, particularly in computing and solid
state physics, and the idea of nucleation and Autobiography suck Klug - horse Aaron growth in a phase change stories Aaron Klug plunder rape - pillage Autobiography and had by mother langston Aaron - son hughes Autobiography to Klug its
hot - Klug Aaron Autobiography boys galleries underwear in echo when I Aaron Klug Autobiography horse - suck came later to think about the assembly of tobacco mosaic virus.
After taking my Ph.D., I spent a year in the Colloid Science department in Cambridge,
working with F.J.W. Roughton, who had asked Hartree for someone to help him
tackle the problem of simultaneous diffusion and chemical reaction, such as
occurs when oxygen enters a red blood cell. The methods I had developed for
the problem in steel were applicable here, and I was glad to put them to use
on an interesting new problem. The quantitative data came from experiments in
which thin layers of blood were exposed to oxygen or carbon monoxide. In the
course of my stay there, I also showed how one could analyse the experimental
kinetic curves for the reaction of haemoglobin with carbon dioxide or oxygen
by simulations in the computer, and so fit the rate constants.
This work made me more and more interested in biological matter, and I decided
that I really wanted to work on the X-ray analysis of biological molecules.
I obtained a Nuffield Fellowship to work in J.D. Bernal's department in Birkbeck
College in London and I moved there at the end of 1953. I joined a project on
the protein ribonuclease, but shortly afterwards met Rosalind Franklin, who
had moved to Birkbeck earlier and had begun working on tobacco mosaic virus.
Her beautiful X-ray photographs fascinated me and I was also able to interpret
some pictures which had apparently
anomalous curved layer lines in terms of
the splitting which occurs when the helical parameters are non-rational. From
then on my fate was sealed. I took up the study of tobacco mosaic virus, and
in four short years, together with Kenneth Holmes and John Finch, who had joined
us as research students, we were able to map out the general outline of the
structure of tobacco mosaic virus. This work was done partly in parallel with
that of Donald Caspar, then at Yale, but he spent 1955 - 56 in Cambridge, and
I formed an association with him which continued across the Atlantic for many
years. It was during this time that I met Francis Crick and we published a paper
together on diffraction by helical structures. I was fortunate to work with
him again later, and so be able to learn, as he once wrote of Bragg, from watching
the way he went about a problem.
Rosalind Franklin died in 1958 and, supported by an N.I.H. grant, Finch, Holmes
and I continued the work on viruses, now extended to spherical viruses. We were
joined soon after by Reuben Leberman, a biochemist. In 1962 we moved to the
newly built MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge which, under the
leadership of Perutz, was to house the original unit from the Cavendish Laboratory
(Perutz, Kendrew, Crick and, later, Brenner), enlarged by Sanger's group from
the Biochemistry Department and Hugh Huxley from University College London.
I was thus privileged to join the laboratory at this stage in its expansion
and so be able to take advantage of, and to help build up, its unique environment
of intellectual and technological sophistication. The rest of my scientific
career is largely a matter of record and much of this is dealt with in the lecture
that follows.
However, I should perhaps add that during the 20 years I have been back in Cambridge,
I have been actively involved in the teaching of undergraduates, as well as
of course supervising research students. I am still a Director of Studies in
Natural Science at my College, Peterhouse, and under the tutorial or - as it
is called in Cambridge - supervision, system, I teach undergraduates myself.
I like teaching and the contact with young minds keeps one on one's toes, but
increasing responsibilities have forced me to shed much of it in recent years.
Before I came to Cambridge I married Liebe Bobrow whom I had met in Cape Town.
She trained in modern dance at the Jooss-Leeder School in London and later became
a choreographer and coordinator for the Cambridge Contemporary Dance Group.
More recently she has directed and
acted in the theatre. We have two sons, Adam
and David, born in 1954 and 1963. Adam, after studying History and Economics
at Oxford and the London School of Economics, is now doing research in Econometrics.
David is a second year student of Physics.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1982, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1983
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
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