Aaron Klug on On Being a Good Mentor
  Aaron Klug     Biography    
Recorded: 17 Jun 2005

Well, you have to be interested in what they do. You mustn’t be too—you mustn’t take over. You must allow them to make mistakes if necessary, but not too long. You have to explain. You have to be patient and a mentor. But I taught—in the Cambridge system I taught undergraduates under the tutorial system. Most of my colleagues here don’t. But I had, because of Cambridge, although I was an honorary professor in the university; I’m not an ordinary professor. But in the college system, I was a supervisor or tutor. I taught for 24 years. I taught a variety of subjects: physics, crystallography, genetics. So it gives you a good basis.

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