Humane scientist with full life outside the laboratory
Aaron Klug: A Long Way From Durban
Cambridge University Press, £20
THIS IS a biography of a genius. Sir Aaron Klug FRS OM is not only a Nobel Prizewinning scientist but also a polymath: linguist, lover of the arts, mountaineer, an astute diplomat and a man with an extraordinary life story.
Author Kenneth C Holmes, FRS, was a long-term collaborator of Klug’s from his early years at Birkbeck College and subsequently at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. If, mistakenly, Holmes assumes that all readers of the book will be scientifically literate, and includes lengthy and chal- lenging chapters of detailed scientific information, he also does justice to Aaron Klug’s’s extraordinary journey from Zelva, the Lithuanian shtetl where he was born, to Cambridge, via Durban, where the family emigrated and which was recollected later by Klug as a “relatively sleepy town in sub-tropical surroundings.” Included, too, are unforgettable stories of scientists working in attics, colposted laborating to produce life-changing discoveries, confronting the shocking myopia of the Thatcher government in relation to science education and research funding — and carrying on.
Memorable are chance encounters that transformed Klug’s work, for example a meeting with Rosalind Franklin, who was then working on the tobacco mosaic virus and would become a vital colleague and loved family friend.
“Her beautiful X-ray photographs fascinated me,” Klug noted, “and I was able to interpret some pictures which had apparently anomalous curved layer lines, in terms of the splitting which occurs when the helical parameters are non-rational. From then on my fate was sealed.” (Les Prix Nobel, Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, 1983)
Equally random and equally crucial was his move from Johannesburg — where he did his first degree — to Cape Town. Having joined Hashomer Hatzair at Witwatersrand, Klug was to Cape Town to prop up the failing branch.
Fortunately, he was able simultaneously to fill a post as a demonstrator in physics at Cape Town University, which led to an MSc and a graduate scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge. Aaron Klug’s private life also blossomed in Cape Town. It was where he met musician and radical dancer, Liebe Bobrow, whom he married.
She occupies a key place in Holmes’s narrative. When her husband became president of the Royal Society, she set about giving it a human face.
While science and outstanding scientists — Francis Crick, James Watson, Max Perutz, Sydney Brenner, John Finch, Alan Cormack Godfrey Hounsfield and Sir Alan Fersht, to name but a few — fill the pages, they also reveal Klug’s humanity and unyielding intellect. He has no time for “wrongheadedness” whether in science or politics, but puts his case with uncompromising clarity and thoughtfulness: witness the argument against misogyny at Peterhouse College, Cambridge.
Ironically, Aaron and Liebe were unable to make a life in Israel as they had initially wished.
In 1950, the Weizmann Institute rejected the young scientist. Notwithstanding this, Klug has made an outstanding contribution to the country where his elder son Adam settled and raised a family and very sadly died prematurely.
Holmes records that, at the time of writing, typically of a remarkable family, Yoel, Aaron’s oldest grandchild, elder son of Adam and his wife Debbie, was working for his doctorate at the Weizmann. It is such stories that make this excellent biography irresistible.
Memorable chance encounters
his work
Jane Liddell-King is a freelance writer