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Choosing to work on chromatin

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The citation for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1982
Aaron Klug Scientist
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The citation for the Nobel Prize, an undivided Nobel Prize it was in chemistry, was for the development of crystallographic electron microscopy and the elucidation of the structures of... protein nucleic acid complexes of biological importance. And by that they mean the last part is viruses and chromatin and we've talked about viruses, we haven't yet talked about chromatin, which we're going to do now. But the... the other thing is crystollagraphic electron microscopy is a misnomer because we actually worked with both crystals and also with individual particles. But because the people who gave the citation didn't really understand it, they called it crystallography because the ideas, or some of the ideas which I used came from X-ray crystallography, so it's a funny citation, but I didn't choose it.

Born in Lithuania, Aaron Klug (1926-2018) was a British chemist and biophysicist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982 for developments in electron microscopy and his work on complexes of nucleic acids and proteins. He studied crystallography at the University of Cape Town before moving to England, completing his doctorate in 1953 at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1981, he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University. His long and influential career led to a knighthood in 1988. He was also elected President of the Royal Society, and served there from 1995-2000.

Listeners: John Finch Ken Holmes

John Finch is a retired member of staff of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. He began research as a PhD student of Rosalind Franklin's at Birkbeck College, London in 1955 studying the structure of small viruses by x-ray diffraction. He came to Cambridge as part of Aaron Klug's team in 1962 and has continued with the structural study of viruses and other nucleoproteins such as chromatin, using both x-rays and electron microscopy.

Kenneth Holmes was born in London in 1934 and attended schools in Chiswick. He obtained his BA at St Johns College, Cambridge. He obtained his PhD at Birkbeck College, London working on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus with Rosalind Franklin and Aaron Klug. After a post-doc at Childrens' Hospital, Boston, where he started to work on muscle structure, he joined to the newly opened Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge where he stayed for six years. He worked with Aaron Klug on virus structure and with Hugh Huxley on muscle. He then moved to Heidelberg to open the Department of Biophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research where he remained as director until his retirement. During this time he completed the structure of tobacco mosaic virus and solved the structures of a number of protein molecules including the structure of the muscle protein actin and the actin filament. Recently he has worked on the molecular mechanism of muscle contraction. He also initiated the use of synchrotron radiation as a source for X-ray diffraction and founded the EMBL outstation at DESY Hamburg. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1981 and is a member of a number of scientific academies.

Tags: Nobel Prize, electron microscopy, viruses, chromatin, crystollagraphic electron microscopy, misnomer, citation

Duration: 1 minute, 9 seconds

Date story recorded: July 2005

Date story went live: 24 January 2008