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Born in Lithuania, British chemist Aaron Klug (1926-2018) won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982 for developments in electron microscopy and his work on complexes of nucleic acids and proteins. His long and influential career led to a knighthood in 1988. [Listeners: Ken Holmes, John Finch; date recorded: 2005]

TRANSCRIPT:

[JF] In 1995, you were elected the President of the Royal Society. Can you tell us how it worked? How it functioned? With relation to affecting Government policy or...

Or being taken no notice of? Which is the other part of the story. Well, my involvement with the Royal Society goes back quite a while. I was elected a Fellow in 1969, and of course I sat on various committees, on national committees, and on the selection committees, as they're called. Sectional committees, I should say, which are basically selection committees in different subjects. But in 1989 I was elected to Council. The Royal Society consists of the President and what are called Officers, the Biological Secretary, the Physical Secretary, the Foreign Secretary, and the Treasurer. These are the five Officers, and I was just elected an ordinary member of Council, of which there are 21, and you serve for either two years or one year, that's in the original Statutes of Charles II, so there have to be 21 at any one time. I was elected, and the way George Porter, who was then the President, decided who would stay on for the second year was simply to add up the number of meetings you had attended. If you... those who attended fewer meetings were thrown off Council and some people were glad to do it. The reason I say is '89 because in '89 the... but the Council makes the decisions and prepares... I found the work quite interesting but the major thing we were doing in 1989/1990 was... global warming.

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