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Eighteenth Annual Darwin College Lecture Series 2003

DNA

Changing Science and Society

Lecture 2   :   24 January 2003

The Discovery of the Double Helix

Professor Sir Aaron Klug
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge

Biography   |   Abstract   |   Printable Version

Aaron Klug was educated at the Universities of Witwatersrand, Cape Town and Cambridge. He began as a medical student, transferred to science, and his PhD at the Cavendish Laboratory was in Physics. He joined the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge in 1962, was the Director of the Laboratory from 1986 to 1996, and now continues as a member of staff, leading a research group on gene expression.

He was a colleague of Rosalind Franklin at Birkbeck College in the 1950s soon after the time when her X-ray diffraction of DNA provided key information which allowed Watson and Crick to propose the double helical structure.

His own work has been on the interactions of proteins and nucleic acids and on the elucidation of the structures of large biological molecules and assemblies, including simple viruses and chromatin, by X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy and on the development of new methods for their study. The principle of his method of 3-D image reconstruction in electron microscopy from a series of 2-D tilted images later formed the basis of X-ray CT scanner. In 1982 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His current research is on the structure of DNA and RNA binding proteins which regulate gene expression and in particular on the interaction with DNA and RNA of the zinc finger family of transcription factors which he discovered.

He was President of the Royal Society (1995-2000), is a member of the Order of Merit, a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences, and of the French Academy of Sciences, and has received many honorary degrees. He is an Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse and of Trinity College, Cambridge.

The lectures are given at 5.30 p.m. in The Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue, with an adjacent overflow theatre with live TV coverage. Each lecture is typically attended by 600 people so you must arrive early to ensure a place.