From Durban to the World Kenneth C.HolmesAaron Klug—A Long Way From Durban: A Biography2017Cambridge University Press392 pp. $44.99

At their best, biographies are informative fragments of social, political, and intellectual history. The title of Ken Holmes’ fine biography of Aaron Klug betrays this larger purpose. The subtitle ‘‘a long way from Durban’’ might even have been ‘‘a long way from Zelva’’—the shtetl in Lithuania where Klug was born. For Klug’s story—from Zelva to Durban (at age two), the universities of Witwatersrand (in Johannesburg) and Cape Town to Cambridge and Birkbeck College, and ultimately to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), its directorship, and presidency of the Royal Society—is a revealing, moving, and often entertaining microcosm of postwar intellectual and social history. Klug’s scientific development took him from crystallography to materials science, to biochemical kinetics, and ultimately to what later became known as structural biology. The early careers of Max Perutz and Francis Crick followed similar trajectories from applied physical sciences to the emerging new biology. Klug has described the key transition, which occurred when hemoved from Cambridge to Birkbeck, initially to work on ribonuclease in J.D. Bernal’s department; meeting Rosalind Franklin, who was working there on tobacco mosaic virus, changed everything. ‘‘Her beautiful X-ray photographs fascinated me,’’ Klug wrote in a short autobiographical sketch (Les Prix Nobel, Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, 1983), ‘‘and I was also able to interpret some pictures, which had apparently anomalous curved layer lines, in terms of the splitting which occurs when the helical parameters are non-rational. From then on my fate was sealed.’’ Holmes was a research student in that group, along with John Finch; between 1954 and 1958, Klug, Holmes, Finch, and Franklin laid the groundwork for the study of macromolecular assemblies even now achieving remarkably enhanced power from new technologies in cryo-electron microscopy (EM). Factors other than science also influenced Klug’s moves. At Witwatersrand, he joined Hashomer Hazair, an idealistic Marxist-Zionist youth movement. In 1945, not long after he had completed his first degree, the Johannesburg branch of the organization decreed that he should move to Cape Town to help reorganize the splintered branch there. By chance, there was an opening for a demonstrator in physics at the University of Cape Town, including the opportunity to do an MSc. Klug’s research with R.W. James (from whose definitive monograph The Optical Principles of the Diffraction of X-Raysmany of us learned X-ray physics) ultimately earned him a graduate scholarship to Cambridge. In Cape Town, he met Liebe Bobrow, a musician and dancer, daughter of a radical Jewish activist. Liebe Klug’s substantial contributions to the extra-scientific material in Holmes’ narrative greatly widen its appeal. Aaron Klug once remarked to me that new methods development is nearly always in the service of solving a particular problem; only later is the wider extent of