Sir Aaron Klug

Speaker 40:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and two, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My castaway this week is a scientist. Twenty years ago he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, given to him for his pioneering work on the structure of genes, which has been of crucial importance in our understanding of the nature of cancer. As one commentator described his achievement at the time, it means we can peer right inside a living cell to watch the wheels go round.

Presenter0:51

Born in Lithuania, but brought up in South Africa, he learned, in the free, unpressured environment of his childhood to open his mind to anything which engaged his curiosity. Academic and intellectual success has not contained this natural freedom of spirit. Curiosity, he claims, is probably the strongest single source of knowledge and advance. He is Sir Aaron Klug. And does such curiosity diminish with age, Sir Aaron, or are you as interested as ever in knowing how things work?

Sir Aaron Klug1:21

It hasn't in my case. In fact, it's increased. As the world we know gets more complicated.

Presenter1:26

Do you think you're you're born with that kind of curiosity, or is it something that's inculcated as a result of of of your environment?

Sir Aaron Klug1:35

I think you're born with it. Environment helps. Growing up in Durban is a very colourful experience. All sorts of uh very lively, different cultures mixing, different languages. But um there are many of my, say, my school contemporaries who didn't show any interest.

Sir Aaron Klug1:53

in in the things around them.

Presenter1:55

But what I'm asking is, do we dull the creative instinct of our children sometimes because we force them down the

Sir Aaron Klug2:03

Yes, well I noticed when I came to England, to Cambridge, I saw people who had gone through the Mill School, A-level scholarship, Cambridge, and I felt I was lucky not to have to have done that, for my own, so to speak, education, taking advantage of really quite high standards in in South Africa, but not pressured.

Sir Aaron Klug2:27

I didn't have to.

Sir Aaron Klug2:28

Make choices too early on, that really is the key.

Presenter2:32

Tell me about your first record.

Sir Aaron Klug2:34

My first record is a Zulu war dance. We lived in Durban on the edge of the bush and new suburbs were being created, um roads, and the Zulu work gangs would be around on the edge. There would be a leader and a team, and the leader would call out the rhythm, and the men with pickaxes would then bring their pickaxes down and answer him in a chorus. It's the same patterns you find in Zulu war dances. So I'll choose a a Zulu war dance.

Sir Aaron Klug3:12

Yeah.

Sir Aaron Klug3:15

Come, come.

Sir Aaron Klug3:21

Yeah.

Speaker 33:22

Ushang Abbey!

Speaker 33:30

Wow

Presenter3:33

The Zulu chant and a familiar sound in your childhood air include this was uh near Durban in the twenties, thirties.

Sir Aaron Klug3:36

Okay, this

Presenter3:40

Right on the edge of the bush.

Sir Aaron Klug3:41

We lived on the edge of the bush, yes, and um

Sir Aaron Klug3:44

The primary school I went to was in fact on the edge of the town. There'd be verbat monkeys in the trees, and you could see them eating the fruit called motunguloo. It's a kind of apple which is poisonous to humans, but the monkeys ate it. And it actually I wondered I realized why couldn't we eat it?

Presenter3:58

Did I

Sir Aaron Klug4:02

I think it was my first feelings of curiosity, but we didn't. And there were snakes, and we learned quite a bit about wildlife, and uh we had bikes which would go through the trails. And if you went up the ridge surrounding Durban, you came to Indian market gardeners who supplied all the vegetables. Uh it was really quite uh marvellous to be able to roam. Nowadays one would be scared to go out into those areas.

Presenter4:26

Why had your father taken the family there? Because you were born in Lithuania and taken to South Africa when you were there.

Sir Aaron Klug4:31

Yeah, because

Sir Aaron Klug4:33

It was part of immigration from Eastern Europe.

Presenter4:35

But what did he do, your father? What was his doing?

Sir Aaron Klug4:37

My father had trained as a saddler, but he was basically a cattle dealer. His father had a farm they used to fatten cattle and bring them to market. So when he came to South Africa he actually his experience as a saddler, he was involved in hides and skins and tanning.

Presenter4:54

But but no history of learning in the family of any kind of study.

Sir Aaron Klug4:56

I mean the family of any kind of a family. No, no, no university education.

Presenter5:01

Well what's fascinating um hearing about what you read at school is that, you know, how how British it was really. I I gather all these boys' own comics and Biggles and William and

Sir Aaron Klug5:07

I don't know

Sir Aaron Klug5:09

Oh yes. Oh yes, absolutely. I didn't see any contradiction between these things. I read other things as well. It was all part of the of the culture, the English culture. Durham was a very English town.

Presenter5:12

Yeah.

Presenter5:22

And by the time you came here to England, apparently you you felt totally at home because you you knew all about you knew the layout of London even.

Sir Aaron Klug5:29

I knew the relationship of Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square. One knew this from reading and occasionally I would look at maps. I was fascinated by maps.

Presenter5:38

Who hadn't read Sherlock Holmes?

Sir Aaron Klug5:40

I had read Sherlock Holmes. I knew where Baker Street was.

Presenter5:44

Record number two.

Sir Aaron Klug5:46

Well, record number two is really one of my first introductions to classical music. I had a friend in

Sir Aaron Klug5:53

Durban, who was very musical, played the violin. He himself wasn't such a good violinist, but I did learn to

Presenter5:55

Uh

Sir Aaron Klug6:00

Listen to some uh violin concertos. So, my record I've chosen is the Mendelsohn violin concerto.

Presenter7:07

Jascha Heifitz playing the opening of the first movement of Mendelssohn's violin concerto in E minor with the NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Otturo Toscanini, and that was recorded in nineteen forty four. And memories for you, Aaron Klug, of being at Johannesburg University, where you went in the early forties.

Presenter7:24

Where you when you were only fifteen, you'd been sort of two years ahead of the game all through school and off to university at fifteen.

Speaker 37:28

Uh

Sir Aaron Klug7:28

Yes.

Speaker 37:30

Yeah.

Sir Aaron Klug7:30

Yeah.

Presenter7:30

To read medicine. What what had set you on course for that?

Sir Aaron Klug7:34

Well I when I was at school I'd read a book called Microbe Hunters by Paul de Crefe. There was quite a lot about Louis Pasteur, Koch and also something about viruses, which very people read lots understood about them.

Presenter7:48

But isn't it interesting that that struck a chord with you at that early age and in fact in the end it was what your

Sir Aaron Klug7:51

Yeah.

Presenter7:53

The main body of your life's work was going to be about

Sir Aaron Klug7:54

You're absolutely right. It w it did it echoed later on when I returned and worked on the structure of viruses, in fact. But the only way to do this, I didn't particularly want to be a doctor, but the only way to do microbiology was to go into medical. That was the route. So I went to medical school.

Presenter8:13

And then that's when you went off into all of these other things. You started hearing about other lectures that you had.

Sir Aaron Klug8:18

Yes, I did in my second year. I was doing anatomy dissecting. But I was also doing biochemistry and physiology and I found them more interesting than anatomy. And I realized I would like to understand how things worked, physiology and or in biochemistry or how these things. And then into mathematics. And then into pathology. And into well, I know from that I went into physics actually.

Presenter8:36

And then into mathematics. And then into pathology.

Presenter8:44

But you ended up designing your own degree course, didn't you, effectively?

Sir Aaron Klug8:47

In effect, yes,'cause it wasn't in the curriculum. I did a combination of courses in the medicals, we'll continue with biochemistry and physiology.

Sir Aaron Klug8:56

and starting courses in chemistry and mathematics to catch up.

Presenter9:01

And how much of it has come in useful along the way, or looking back with the bits that you've never used since? Or has there I mean, it'd be wonderful if all of those things had played in.

Sir Aaron Klug9:10

Well, I think I don't think anything is

Sir Aaron Klug9:13

Not used in some way. It's true, I took a course in astronomy. I didn't want experimental psychology as well. So it was, well,

Presenter9:21

Trillium.

Sir Aaron Klug9:23

You must understand, I was perfectly innocent. I didn't regard this as extraordinary.

Presenter9:29

Next piece of music.

Sir Aaron Klug9:31

Well, to concentrate on physics I decided to go to Cape Town and it was marvellous. Cape Town was an old city. The university had been founded a hundred years before Wits. There was culture, there were artists. I met my wife there. She had been studying music and I did my master's degree. My wife took part in a performance from the dance school and she danced to a piece of music by Vaughan Williams. I always remember that. And on the desert island I would like to have that as a memory.

Presenter11:03

Part of Vaughan Williams' Phantasia on Greensleeves, played by the English String Orchestra conducted by William Boughton, and memories for you, Aaron Klug, of Cape Town and meeting your wife.

Presenter11:13

Just after the war. Let's spoon on now through those years during which you came to this country to Cambridge and did your PhD and then on to what seems to be a very important turning point when you were twenty seven, twenty-eight years old and you began to work with Rosalind Franklin, who many argue we should say as an aside should have shared the Nobel Prize with Crick and Watson for the discovery of DNA.

Sir Aaron Klug11:29

Yeah.

Presenter11:34

Let me quote you. You said Her beautiful X ray photographs fascinated me, and from then on my fate was sealed. What was so attractive about those photographs?

Sir Aaron Klug11:44

Well

Sir Aaron Klug11:45

I I went to Birkbeck not to work with her, but to work on protein crystallography. I met her there quite by chance. She had moved to Birkbeck after leaving London, King's College London, where she had taken those famous X-ray diffraction photographs of DNA which had helped Crick and Watson to solve the structure of DNA and therefore produce the double helix.

Sir Aaron Klug12:08

She was engaged in studying the structure of tobacco mosaic virus, which is a simple virus. It had been the first virus to be studied, and one could learn general principles about it. It was the viral RNA which carried the genetic data, that is the infectivity.

Presenter12:24

So you could begin to see how the virus would infect the cell, how it would invade it and.

Sir Aaron Klug12:24

The you could

Sir Aaron Klug12:27

Yes, well yes, when the virus is lying around in the ground or in uh outside, it's stable against heat and acid and things of that sort up to a point. So it's the protective coat. But the coat is also used in recognizing an entry point into the cell. It's the mother of all viruses.

Presenter12:48

And is it the same then in human beings? You didn't know that then.

Sir Aaron Klug12:53

No, but there are. I did later work on poliovirus, which is again a simple virus. It has the shape of a sphere rather than a rod like Tobacco Music virus. But as we demonstrated, it's built on a similar principle, a number of identical protein units forming a spherical shell.

Sir Aaron Klug13:11

and built according to the geometry of a G D sigdalum.

Presenter13:15

A geodesic dome, we should say, in common terms, is the shape of what yes, but it's the shape of a football, isn't it?

Sir Aaron Klug13:18

Sometimes it's the shape of the

Sir Aaron Klug13:21

Yes, yes. Well, no, the pattern, the the shape of football, but it has the pattern of sixes and fives as in the football.

Presenter13:24

Yeah.

Presenter13:28

But we don't know.

Sir Aaron Klug13:29

But we didn't know that at the time.

Presenter13:30

No, but that's what fascinated you, isn't it? Am I right in saying it was the shape, that that that there was sort of some perfect geometry going on.

Sir Aaron Klug13:37

Well, to Macam's egg virus is a perfect helix.

Presenter13:40

But what you really wanted to understand were the rules that government

Sir Aaron Klug13:43

That governed the assembly. How were they built? How did the RNA, how did the protein recognize its own RNA?

Presenter13:50

And to do that you had to have special high-powered microscopes, electron microscopes, so you had to move back to Cambridge, right?

Sir Aaron Klug13:57

Cambridge offered more opportunities. This newly created laboratory had electron microscopes in it, and I thought that would be an easier way.

Sir Aaron Klug14:05

To study virus structure rather than the X-ray crystallography, where you have to crystallize the virus and it's an indirect method, very powerful, but indirect.

Presenter14:14

Tell me about record number four.

Sir Aaron Klug14:16

Oh, record number four does remind me of my days in London, uh, before I moved to Cambridge, going walking across Hyde Park to Albert Hall.

Sir Aaron Klug14:27

and hearing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Sir Aaron Klug14:30

I went with my wife and it was a marvellous day and it was a marvellous performance. I don't remember who the conductor was. It may have been Beecham.

Presenter15:39

Part of the final movement, the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony sung by the Gulbenkian Choir Lisbon, with the orchestra of the eighteenth century conducted by Franz Brueggen.

Presenter15:48

The year, Aaron, Klug, that you moved back to Cambridge to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology was nineteen sixty two, and that was the year that the Nobel Prizes were were pouring in there. There were two that year, weren't there?

Sir Aaron Klug15:59

Boom.

Sir Aaron Klug16:01

There were two that year, John Kendrick Max Perrut, for the first structure of the protein by X-ray crystallography, and the structure of the DNA double helix to Crick and Watson.

Presenter16:06

X-ray crystalline.

Presenter16:13

But in fact, the laboratory has won nine Nobel Prizes, including yours, which came in eighty two, over forty years. That's more than coincidence. How do you explain its success?

Sir Aaron Klug16:20

That's

Sir Aaron Klug16:23

Well, I think it's essentially due to the enlightened policy of the Medical Research Council, which supports basic work, which doesn't seem to necessarily be leading anywhere, but is already an exploration of biological processes.

Presenter16:40

So it's following your natural curiosity.

Sir Aaron Klug16:42

Yeah, yes, that's I mean, that's the principle of thing. And it's uh it's curiosity in the best sense of the word.

Presenter16:48

One can see that argument and I mean indeed one knows, you know, that the microwave wasn't invented by somebody who was trying to improve or make a better cooking implementation.

Sir Aaron Klug16:56

That's right, absolutely, yes.

Presenter16:58

But at the same time, very, very difficult to justify funds, isn't it? When you say.

Sir Aaron Klug17:03

Just

Presenter17:05

We want some funds to fund people to do something that they don't really know quite where they're going, they're just curious about it, and we're not quite sure whether it will lead anywhere.

Sir Aaron Klug17:15

You have enlightened patrons, that's what it comes down to.

Sir Aaron Klug17:18

If you're exploring the unknown, you really just have to choose a field or problem or an issue which looks likely to be important, and that's a matter of judgment.

Sir Aaron Klug17:28

Partly intuition, but intuition involves a great deal of experience and know how. But you have to have time to succeed. These aren't quick things.

Presenter17:37

Next record.

Sir Aaron Klug17:38

I thought I couldn't have a programme of eight records without having some Mozart in it. I've chosen uh excerpt from the magic flute.

Sir Aaron Klug18:19

It's over sign.

Speaker 318:23

Spoilers will be with spike!

Speaker 318:36

Turn me back in the shrink and turn it into shrinkers. Leave a climate in behind.

Sir Aaron Klug18:36

Sorry.

Presenter18:38

Yeah.

Presenter18:40

Leave it finally.

Presenter18:46

Eva Lint as Papagena and Olaf Baer as Papagheno singing their love duet from Act two of Mozart's The Magic Flute with the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields conducted by Sir Neville Mariner.

Presenter18:57

Can you describe to me then, Sir Aaron, how you achieved this ability to look into the living cell and see its construction? Because you first of all you had this picture which you then put under the electron microscope, but it wasn't enough.

Sir Aaron Klug19:11

Well, there were two reasons. One is that everything in the line of sight is projected into two dimensions, so one had to re recreate the three dimensional structure from a series of two dimensional images.

Presenter19:24

So the two-dimensional images would be like a normal X-ray.

Sir Aaron Klug19:26

In a normal X-ray people can interpret them because they know what the structure of the body is, and so they don't need anything fancy, as I was told when I was introducing these methods. The other issue is because the electron microscope gives you very poor contrast, you have to stain the biological specimen to show it up.

Presenter19:28

Yes.

Sir Aaron Klug19:49

Now this tends to distort the specimen, so I also introduced a method of taking electron micrographs of unstained specimens by using various optical tricks, defocusing, things of that sort, and then computer reconstruction. And that has made it possible to look into natural cells, natural molecules, without staining.

Presenter20:10

Now

Presenter20:14

But essentially then what you were doing was it was photographing these things from various different angles and then blending all those angles together.

Sir Aaron Klug20:19

Different angles and then blending all those angles. And different states of focus. Basically, if you might put it to enhance the contrast.

Speaker 320:26

Mm.

Presenter20:26

And if you fed all of that then into a computer, the computer could p paint in the pictures for you.

Sir Aaron Klug20:32

Yes, but the computer's neither here nor there. It just does the things quickly you could do by hand. Uh it it just sets the mathematics. The computer is nothing it doesn't do anything that you don't tell it to do.

Sir Aaron Klug20:42

It's very stupid, a computer is just fast.

Presenter20:45

So you calculate all of these these things mathematically, and that enables you then to sum up.

Sir Aaron Klug20:49

Yeah.

Sir Aaron Klug20:50

Reduce a three-dimensional map of the object you're looking at.

Presenter20:52

No map

Presenter20:54

Yes, and so then you are actually, as I said at the beginning, more or less seeing inside this leather living.

Sir Aaron Klug20:59

Yes, you sing you sing right through it.

Presenter21:01

But one of the major spin offs is that, as I understand it, this revolutionary technique that you developed was the the CAT scanner, the X-ray machine that does exactly what we've been describing, really producing three dimensional pictures of the inner recesses of the body.

Sir Aaron Klug21:08

The X-ray machine.

Sir Aaron Klug21:14

Yes, yes, right. Yes, it's exactly the same principle. It's a three-dimensional map.

Presenter21:19

Someone described it to me as rather like slicing through a hard-boiled egg sideways on, as it were, and getting all of the series of layers. So you would see where the yolk was narrower and then became wider and then went narrower.

Sir Aaron Klug21:24

So you would see where the

Sir Aaron Klug21:30

And then became wider than the other. But in on the computer you can tilt it at any angle. The sections are just uh something for you to look at.

Presenter21:39

But now somebody else won the Nobel Prize for that for the invention of the cat skin.

Sir Aaron Klug21:43

Yes, it was a Mac Hansfeld and Cormac.

Sir Aaron Klug21:46

Um my paper was published in Nature in January.

Sir Aaron Klug21:50

In 1968, Hansfield took out a patent on it, not on the method, because the method had been described, but on the instrument. He persuaded EMI to build the brain scanner.

Presenter22:00

So the CAT scanner was invented, but I mean sh should you not have been mentioned in in that Nobel award?

Sir Aaron Klug22:06

Some people think so. But I got a I got the Nobel Prize on my own some years later, a few years later, for the electron microscopy, and I didn't have to share it with anybody.

Presenter22:19

Michael number six.

Sir Aaron Klug22:21

Record number six is Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance. It was played at a Nobel ceremony.

Presenter23:31

That was the English string orchestra conducted by William Boutchen again in the opening of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance Military March No. One in D Major, and you go on to sing the words, you say, Aaron Cluke, on your desert island.

Sir Aaron Klug23:43

Yes, the one attraction of the desert islands I'd have the freedom uh to sing um the words um Land of Hope and Glory, which I know the words which follow on from the military march.

Presenter23:54

You've done so much more work than we've had time or space to talk about, both before the Nobel and indeed since it, on how chromosomes are created, how genes are switched on and off.

Presenter24:07

The question we all want the answer to, and it's why we keep asking it, and in a sense I make no apology, is that the beginning, being able to switch genes on and off, of a cure for cancer? Or I mean how close are we? Are we any closer? We don't seem to get any closer. We seem to throw a lot of money at it, but are we getting there?

Sir Aaron Klug24:25

I don't think

Sir Aaron Klug24:26

That's not so. In certain cases, for example, one of the leukemias, chronic myological leukemia, now 90% of the cases are solved. But in fact, the progress in understanding cancers come not from tackling it directly. Most that we know about gene action in cancers come from studies on animal viruses, some of which do produce cancerous conditions.

Presenter24:51

But how much closer are we? I mean, in it in its simplest form, as as the layman understands it, uh you know, we have to discover how to stop the cell multiplication that occurs.

Sir Aaron Klug25:01

We now understand very clearly which mutations and which genes produce cancer. We understand it takes more than one such mutation. You usually have to have a series. But all this must be based upon a real understanding of cell biology and gene action. And we're getting closer to that. And so this

Presenter25:19

Can we put a time expectation?

Sir Aaron Klug25:21

No, no, you can't do that. You can't, you can't do that. You, um

Presenter25:25

But are we talking tens of years or?

Sir Aaron Klug25:28

I think we'll make steady progress.

Presenter25:30

I put number seven.

Sir Aaron Klug25:31

This is a record for light relief. I had thought of choosing Gershwin. They wouldn't believe me. That reflects quite a lot of my scientific career when I said things I was told it couldn't be done or which was impossible or whatever. But I decided in the end to do something in a similar vein and chose Cole Porter. And it also reminds me of the American musical Later on Oklahoma things which I saw in London in the theatre.

Speaker 326:02

You're the purple light of a summer night insane. You're the National Gallery, your garble salary, your cellophane.

Sir Aaron Klug26:07

Garble salary

Speaker 326:12

You're Sublime.

Speaker 326:15

You're a turkey dinner. You're the time

Speaker 326:20

Of the Derby winner. I'm a toy balloon that faded soon to pop. But if baby, I'm the bottom, you're the top.

Presenter26:31

Coal Porter singing you're the top, and that was recorded in 1934. You said when you were President of the Royal Society, Saraira, and which you were for the last five years of the last century, which makes it sound like a long time ago now, but of course it wasn't, you said that the most pressing problem facing the world was population growth and how the planet can withstand the predicted increase in the population of one-third by 2025. How great is your fear that it can't?

Sir Aaron Klug27:00

Well, it's the at the moment we can have been able to sustain population growth by increased food productivity, by incre various health measures and things of that sort. But I am worried about this and have been worried about it because I think it's really the fifth horseman of the apocalypse and the various bodies have tried to limit it. But it one knows that improved economic circumstances reduce the size of families. And there has been if you look at the data, say from Pakistan, which is one of the highest in the list, it has been coming down the number of births per woman, that's how it's calculated. But it's not coming down fast enough.

Presenter27:44

But it's the soaring demand for energy that's the problem, isn't it?

Sir Aaron Klug27:47

Oh, that's another. That's because of the population who need that as well.

Presenter27:49

Example

Presenter27:51

But I presume you you

Sir Aaron Klug27:54

And in case of energy, the problem there is, although we have fossil fuels and we've been burning them at a great rate, these fossil fuels produce carbon dioxide, and the physics is incontrovertible. If you put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it will produce a greenhouse effect. And I think the National Academy, which is the counterpart of the Royal Society, has now at last come out quite strongly to say that global warming has a large human contribution. It isn't just some long term climate change. And I think this will have an effect.

Presenter28:19

Wrongly.

Sir Aaron Klug28:29

It may take a few years. But you see, even in this country It was in nineteen eighty nine when I was on the council of the Royal Society before

Sir Aaron Klug28:39

before ten years before I became President, we produced a booklet called The Greenhouse Effect, published in Suisablian Green, pointing out these things. But it took a long time, five more years, before people set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So one works away at it.

Presenter28:56

Sure.

Presenter28:58

Indeed, but it it leaves the scientist, doesn't it, with a huge amount of responsibility on his shoulders really, because unless you step forward and tell us these things and really push them under our noses and say listen to this, talk about this, debate this, then we wouldn't know necessarily.

Sir Aaron Klug29:08

Didn't really

Sir Aaron Klug29:09

Under our noses and sounds.

Sir Aaron Klug29:15

Well, absolutely. But you see, we can't say with absolute certainty. The point is that these are situations where there's a certain degree of uncertainty. And once you admit that, and you have somebody saying that your night program catching you out, can you be absolutely sure? Of course, is so-and-so in say genetically modified powers, is it absolutely safe? Of course you can't say that.

Presenter29:39

But that's not a reason for not stepping forward and saying what you think, is it?

Sir Aaron Klug29:41

Yeah, yes.

Presenter29:43

But I suppose w w what I'm asking really to to sort of come full circle, having begun with you as this this this curious young boy is is w whether in a way you have a a duty having

Presenter29:54

Been blessed with this intellect that you have to and whether you feel that it is your duty to try and do your best to understand the world in all its aspects and actually to.

Sir Aaron Klug30:01

The book

Presenter30:04

Exercise that intellect and to pass it on to us.

Sir Aaron Klug30:07

Yes, well, yes, indeed. I was told by various colleagues that it was my duty to become President of the Royal Society. My inclination would have been to stay in the lab.

Sir Aaron Klug30:16

But it is a public duty and I've spent most of my five years at the Royal Society were concerned with two things. One is to trying to preserve the health of the science base in Britain, which involves education, things of that sort as well. And the second was issues of science policy when it comes to global problems. I'm glad I did it, but as you say, it's one's duty.

Sir Aaron Klug30:44

Something I learnt about at school long ago in Durban.

Presenter30:49

Last record.

Sir Aaron Klug30:50

My last record is Khornidre. Khornidre is the opening chant at Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and the Cantor sings it. Khornidre means all oaths, and it's really a kind of introduction to prayers. It it's not directly concerned with sins and things of that sort. It's concerned with nullifying all oaths. What it means is that you must start a fresh life again. I've chosen not the cantor singing it, but some music by Max Bruch.

Presenter32:27

The opening of Max Brook's Colnidre, played by Ophra Harnoy, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Charles Macaras. Now, if you could only take uh one of those records, Ehrencluke, which one would you take?

Sir Aaron Klug32:40

I take the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. One is because it's a marvellous piece of music, and also because it was my one of my favourite pieces of my elder son, who died some years ago, so it would be partly in memory of him. I have a second son, uh and I think if I'd had another record I might have taken something more light.

Sir Aaron Klug33:03

Uh for him.

Presenter33:03

Bit of Jimi Hendrix, eh?

Sir Aaron Klug33:05

Jimi Hendricks, yes.

Presenter33:05

See you in the next one.

Sir Aaron Klug33:06

Exactly. So I thought Beethoven's ninth and the eighty will last longer than Jimi Hendrix.

Presenter33:12

What about your book?

Sir Aaron Klug33:14

I would like some a set of books on Roman Republican coinage and Roman imperial coinage. I hope I be permitted.

Presenter33:24

But is this something else you know all about?

Sir Aaron Klug33:26

Yes, I'm interested in the historical aspects which they celebrate. That's what I'm interested in, not in so much in the perfection of the coin.

Presenter33:35

And what about your luxury?

Sir Aaron Klug33:37

My luxury would be a set of mixed Greek and Roman coins w and then I'd have the coins to sort out and I'd have the books to research w with.

Presenter33:49

Sir Ayron Cluke, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island descs.

Sir Aaron Klug33:53

Thank you.

Speaker 434:01

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