Aaron Klug on Jim Watson: Writer
  Aaron Klug     Biography    
Recorded: 17 Jun 2005

Oh, Jim is a very good, very good writer. Very forceful. He doesn’t do subtleties though. He and the story of the Double Helix, he deserves a literary prize because it’s a kind of confessional biography, but it’s very powerfully written. It’s powerfully written because he leaves out quite a bit. He concentrates upon the main things. All his writing, he’s a very good writer. Crick is a more reasoned—the prose flows differently. Jim, when he hits he hits, he hits and hits home.

Aaron Klug is chemist and biophysicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry. After completing his BSc at University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, he attended the University of Cape Town on scholarship where he received M.Sc. degree. In 1949 he moved to Cambridge in England, he studied molecular structure of steel and wrote a thesis on the changes that occur when molten steel solidifies, for which he earned Ph.D. in 1952.

In 1953 he obtained a fellowship to work at Birkbeck Collage in London, where he met Rosalind Franklin. They worked together to determine the structural nature of the tobacco mosaic virus. After Franklin's death in 1958 he continued his work on viruses together with Kenneth Holmes and John Finch. In 1962 he accepted a position at Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

His major contribution to scientific research was the development of crystallography electron microscopy for which he was awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1988.

More Information: Wikipedia, Nobelprize.org