Aaron Klug's career has taken many turns, spanning physics, biology, chemistry, and administration. The names that he drops occupy an integral place in this soft-spoken 77-year-old's life story: from Rosalind Franklin, with whom he began working on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), to Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes inspired Klug's ideas on spherical viruses.
Born into a Jewish family, Klug moved at 2 years of age from Lithuania to South Africa, where he was schooled in the English tradition. At 15 he attended university in Johannesburg and toyed with the idea of becoming a scholar, a linguist, or an Egyptologist, perhaps, but ultimately he pursued a science degree instead. He went on to study, and later revolutionize, crystallography.
My favorite, although not the most important, is "The assembly of tobacco mosaic virus."1 It assembles itself in the most remarkable way.
TMV is like a first love, because it ...
