Aaron Klug interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 11th December 2007

0:09:07 Born in Lithuania in 1926; father's father was a cattle dealer and had a farm which was unusual for a Jew; father was trained as a saddler but went back to the farm to help his father as a cattle dealer; realized there was not much future in Lithuania and moved to South Africa in 1929; mother's family had emigrated there in 1900 (her family name was Gevisser) and had established a business in Durban so that is where we went; learnt English early; have an elder brother; father employed in the Gevisser firm as a hide merchant; he had gone ahead to Durban and found a place to live and the family followed; father's brother later emigrated to Johannesburg; father much concerned with making a good living and had been regarded as clever; he would go to the synagogue and was interested in the Talmud and when he retired he went for weekly study; when I married in England he sent extracts by post; mother died when I was about six of pneumonia; mother's younger sister had come with us and later married my father; told that one of the older Gevisser cousins had said it was her duty to marry my father and help bring us up; we still continued to call her aunt though later realized she was our mother and changed to mum

8:36:12 Went to a primary school; lived near the bush; Durban had a white population of 100,000, mainly of English origin who thought of England as home; Britain had taken Natal from the Dutch and in 1870 there was a large emigration to Durban; on our first holiday in England we went to Swanage and noticed that the beach huts there had been copied in Durban, so had the post boxes; as a child knew a lot about England so when I came here knew exactly where I was; later moved to Durban High School where the philosophy was that if you were bright you went into the Latin class (Greek had been abandoned as we had to do Afrikaans as a second language); if you were middling you went into the science class, and the rest made do with geography; I was very good at school and always came first and my brother, second; he was in the same class although two years older; I had been pushed up but he was my protector; we did do one science subject; was very good at Latin; also brother and I went to Hebrew classes and I was pretty fluent in Afrikaans; later when I began collecting ancient coins could read the inscriptions; later when one of my sons started doing Latin at school got an interlingua text but found the Latin word order had been changed to fit the English so threw it away in disgust

15:56:08 Thing that mattered most at Durban High School was sport which occupied four afternoons a week; had cadets on the fifth day; brother was a good cricketer; I was not good at sport and later when undergoing an army medical found that I had an optic atrophy in my right eye; brother keen on music and I began to listen to serious music in last few years at school; in primary school I couldn't sing in tune; my wife is musical so I do listen; she ran the Cambridge University modern dance group at some time and experimented with Stockhausen and electronic music

19:46:13 No particular inspirational teacher at school; was good at all subjects; at one time became seriously interested in Egyptology and tried to teach myself hieroglyphics and learnt a good deal on the origins of the alphabet; at school read a book by Paul de Kruif called 'Microbe Hunters' which turns out to have influenced many people; he was a Dutch science writer and in this book he told the stories of Pasteur and Koch; made me think I should become a microbiologist; at fifteen went to university to do medicine (as did Sidney Brenner) as two years ahead of my age group; no medical school in Durban so went to University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg; sailed through my first year; stayed in my father's brother's house; had won a scholarship so did not have any fees; in my second year started doing anatomy, physiology and physiological chemistry; enjoyed dissection to begin with and found physiology and biochemistry much more interesting so decided I should learn some chemistry and give up medicine; went to see the Dean of Science who agreed that I should do a range of subjects - chemistry, physiology, histology, physics and maths; did a four year course instead of three; got firsts in every subject

25:56:05 No particularly inspiring teachers but a man who gave a popular talk on the Schrödinger wave equation had inspired me to do physics; I had intellectual curiosity and found everything interesting; always read history and have continued to do so; where I got inspired was in Cape Town where they were offering a master's degree in physics; kept myself by teaching practical classes which gave me enough to live on; lived simply in a room in the old slave quarters; parents sent me money but I returned it as wanted to be independent; the Professor was R.W. James and he was an inspiration, not only because of himself but where he had been; he had gone with Shackleton on his polar expedition and been marooned on Elephant Island; he was recruited by Shackleton when just out of Cambridge; was a contemporary of Lawrence Bragg; Shackleton asked him if he could sing as they had to supply their own entertainment; I did apply to the South African Antarctic Survey but they wouldn't take me as I wore glasses; met my future wife, Liebe, in Cape Town; she was a music student at the University and later went to modern dance school; fell in love and was absorbed in the wider culture of a beautiful old city; Durban was provincial in comparison although it had a good library

31:56:03 James had worked with Bragg and in 1937 emigrated to Cape Town to take the Chair; Bragg moved to Cambridge in 1938 when Rutherford died; it is possible that when I came to Cambridge they wanted me to do crystallography as I'd started in X-ray crystallography in Cape Town as James had done; James represented to me the modern Cambridge position; I did the two year M.Sc. course in one year and actually solved the crystal structure of an organic molecule by a new method using Fourier transforms; on the strength of this James thought I should go to Cambridge; I had toyed with the idea of going to London as the crystal structure I had solved was rather unusual and I had taught myself quantum chemistry so when I came to Cambridge I wanted to do something unusual in X-ray crystallography; had heard of the MRC unit doing work on haemoglobin and myoglobin; went to see Bragg on arrival who told me the unit was full; don't believe that was true but one of my predecessors from Cape Town had been a lady, Virginia Martin, who proved to be very clever but hopeless at research; asked Bragg what I should do who said there was an interesting problem in order disorder in silicates; I now find them fascinating but didn't think so at the time; boat took two weeks from Cape Town and for the first two months in Cambridge still had no supervisor; was at Trinity where my tutor was William Hamilton who was not much help; originally thought I might do a Part II but he thought I knew enough for a PhD; finally taken on by D.R. Hartree, Professor of Mathematical Physics, to work on a problem left over from the war on the cooling of steel; in the end I had learnt a lot of metallurgy and worked out a model of phase transition to account for the dissipation of heat; I modelled this on a computer; never published my PhD thesis; Hartree was not a good supervisor; he was a train addict, but not inspiring; enjoyed my time going to mathematical lectures and learnt group theory, which later stood me in good stead

40:53:01 Married very young and wife went off to live in London to study at the Joos-Leeder School of Modern Dance; the school had been housed by Alice Roughton in Adams Road, Cambridge, during the war but had moved by the time we arrived in Cambridge; my wife kept herself by teaching in a Secondary Modern school; never worked with Bragg; now realize that he may have thought me odd as I only wanted to do things that interested me; however, when I worked on the assembly of tobacco mosaic virus people were trying to understand how the virus assembled and they mixed protein and the RNA and waited twenty-four hours; I managed to do it in two to three hours using the model of nucleational growth that I had developed for my Ph.D. thesis to understand my experiments on tobacco mosaic virus (description)

46:05:14 Spent a year with F.J.W. Roughton, the husband of Alice; worked with him solving the mathematics required for the problem of the combination of oxygen with haemoglobin where both simultaneous diffusion and chemical reaction occur at the same time; used the mathematics developed for PhD; went back to crystallography in London but continued doing things for Roughton; memory of Roughton household in Adams Road; saw advertisement for a Nuffield Fellowship at Birkbeck College where J.D. Bernal was; he was an amazing man who never carried anything through to completion as always interested in the next problem; went to work on protein crystallography with Harry Carlisle who Bernal had recruited from Dorothy Hodgkin; he was trying to solve a protein by some method that didn't work and he refused to see it; I was banished but still had my Nuffield Fellowship and I found myself in a room next to Rosalind Franklin; I had been there for four months already but had not met her before; she showed me her pictures of tobacco mosaic virus; she changed my life as she introduced me to an important and difficult problem that would take years; I worked with her from 1955 to 1958 when she died; she had come from King's College to work on the tobacco mosaic virus, work which Bernal had started in the 1930's but which was interrupted by the war; as a person she was brisk, to the point, and not at all the person painted in Watson's book 'The Double Helix'; she was a rationalist; I got on with her quite well and she treated me as an equal; when she died I took over her three post-graduate assistants including Kenneth  Holmes and John Finch who later moved with me to Cambridge; we managed to get a grant from the United States National Institute for Health as we were the only group working on virus structure; in 1958 after her death I took up the problem of polio virus structure which she had started; through the introduction of a new kind of glass managed to solve polio in 1959; showed Bernal the first X-ray picture of polio virus crystals and he said that the picture was worth £10,000; I had not realized that Bernal had to keep raising money to fund his lab; Rosalind Franklin had been hired to work on coals and carbons not on plant viruses; Bernal's idea was to raise money from applied research to fund pure research; [shows the model of RNA on the staircase of the MRC unit in Cambridge]