From Durban to the World

Abstract

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.