Aaron Klug
| Aaron Klug
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| | Born | August 11 1926 (1926-08-11) (age 83)
Želva, Lithuania |
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| Nationality | United Kingdom |
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| Field | Biophysics, chemistry |
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| Notable prizes | Nobel Prize in Chemistry |
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Sir Aaron Klug, OM, FRS (born 11 August 1926) is a Lithuanian-born British chemist and biophysicist, and winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.[1]
Biography
Klug was born in Želva, Lithuania and moved to South Africa at the age of two where he later graduated with a degree in science at the University of Witwatersrand and studied crystallography at the University of Cape Town before moving to England, completing his doctorate at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1953.
Career
Working with Rosalind Franklin in John Bernal's lab at Birkbeck aroused a lifelong interest in the study of viruses, and during his time there in the late 1950s he made discoveries in the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. Over the following decade Klug used methods from X-ray diffraction, microscopy and structural modelling to develop crystallographic electron microscopy in which a sequence of two-dimensional images of crystals taken from different angles are combined to produce three-dimensional images of the target.
He was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in 1981. Between 1986 and 1996 he was director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, and was knighted in 1988. Sir Aaron was elected President of the Royal Society, and served from 1995-2000. He was appointed OM in 1995.
In 2005 Aaron was awarded South Africa's Order of Mapungubwe (gold) for exceptional achievements in medical science.[2]
References
- ^ The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (18 October 1982). "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1982". Press release. Retrieved on 2007-09-13.
- ^ National Orders awards 27 September 2005. State of South Africa (29 September 2005). Retrieved on 2007-09-13.
| Honorary titles
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Preceded by
Sir Michael Atiyah
| President of the Royal Society
1995–2000
| Succeeded by
The Lord May of Oxford
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| Nobel Laureates in Chemistry |
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William Lipscomb (1976) •
Ilya Prigogine (1977) •
Peter D. Mitchell (1978) •
Herbert C. Brown / Georg Wittig (1979) •
Paul Berg / Walter Gilbert / Frederick Sanger (1980) •
Kenichi Fukui / Roald Hoffmann (1981) •
Aaron Klug (1982) •
Henry Taube (1983) •
Robert Merrifield (1984) •
Herbert A. Hauptman / Jerome Karle (1985) •
Dudley R. Herschbach / Yuan T. Lee / John Polanyi (1986) •
Donald J. Cram / Jean-Marie Lehn / Charles J. Pedersen (1987) •
Johann Deisenhofer / Robert Huber / Hartmut Michel (1988) •
Sidney Altman / Thomas Cech (1989) •
Elias Corey (1990) •
Richard R. Ernst (1991) •
Rudolph A. Marcus (1992) •
Kary Mullis / Michael Smith (1993) •
George Olah (1994) •
Paul J. Crutzen / Mario J. Molina / Frank Rowland (1995) •
Robert Curl / Harold Kroto / Richard Smalley (1996) •
Paul D. Boyer / John E. Walker / Jens Christian Skou (1997) •
Walter Kohn / John Pople (1998) •
Ahmed Zewail (1999) •
Alan J. Heeger / Alan MacDiarmid / Hideki Shirakawa (2000)
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Complete roster |
(1901–1925) |
(1926–1950) |
(1951–1975) |
(1976-2000) |
(2001–2025)
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| Persondata
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| NAME
| Klug, Aaron
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| ALTERNATIVE NAMES
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| SHORT DESCRIPTION
| chemist, biophysicist
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| DATE OF BIRTH
| August 11, 1926
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| PLACE OF BIRTH
| Želva, Lithuania
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| DATE OF DEATH
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| PLACE OF DEATH
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