To listen to more of Aaron Klug’s stories, go to the playlist: [ Ссылка ]
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] Did getting the Nobel Prize affect your life considerably?
Oh, yes, I got invited to things. I got invited to attend meetings and began to open buildings, but not as many as when I was later President of the Royal Society, but I think... I think it went on because at the time I got the Nobel Prize, I was already thinking of what to do next after chromatin and I had already started on the 5SRNA and TF3A system, and I was very much absorbed by that. So I guess it was... and in anyway in Cambridge, they don't make too much fuss about a Nobel Prize, not like Italy where you become a bit of a film star, and I think it's quite a good thing. It wasn't all that novel. I mean, people were quite pleased, because there had been a 20-year gap from the Nobel Prizes Perutz and Kendrew, Crick and Watson, but of course in the meantime, that's in... if you call it structural biology, but of course Fred Sanger – had got a Nobel Prize, his second Nobel Prize in 1980. The mystery was, why did I get a Nobel Prize and César Milstein not, because he was hanging around on the list. I think mine came as a bit of a surprise to a number of people, because the kind of work we were doing wasn't in those days, it wasn't even called structural molecular biology.
