Klug, Sir Aaron [key], 1926–2018, British biochemist, b. Lithuania. Raised and educated in South Africa, he moved to England and completed his doctorate at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1953. In the 1950s, Klug began to study viruses, initially working at Birkbeck College, London, with Rosalind Franklin on X-ray diffraction studies of tobacco mosaic virus. Joining the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge in 1962, he eventually used electron microscopy and structural modeling to study the three-dimensional nature of the polio virus and other viruses. It was for this work that he won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He later studied transfer RNA and chromatin, and discovered (1995) zinc-finger proteins, which bind to specific groups of DNA base pairs and are used in research and medical therapy. From 1986 to 1996 he headed the Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He then was an emeritus scientist there until he retired in 2012.
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