Nobel prize winner Aaron Klug’s research achievements have had a profound impact on the understanding of diseases including Cancer, Polio and Alzheimer’s, with the Lithuanian-born British scientist’s discovery of modular proteins called zinc fingers, inspiring their synthetic design in targeting various conditions.

A research fellowship at Birkbeck, in 1953, and collaboration on vital research with virologist, Rosalind Franklin into proteins and viruses, led to a great advancement in the knowledge of the structure of the Tobacco mosaic virus, the first pathogen to be identified as a virus. That same year, he became director of the Virus Structure Research Group at Birkbeck.

In 1982, Klug was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his investigations of the three-dimensional structure of viruses and other particles and for the development of crystallographic electron microscopy.