Aaron Klug was born in Zelva in Lithuania, 11 August 1926, the son of Lazar Klug and Bella Klug (née Silin), and was brought up from the age of two in South Africa, mainly in Durban. He was educated at Durban High School; the University of Witwatersrand; the University of Cape Town; and Trinity College, Cambridge. He married Liebe Bobrow in 1948, with whom he had two sons.

In 1953, he joined the staff of Birkbeck College, London, where he worked with Rosalind Franklin on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus, in the laboratory headed by J. D. Bernal. In 1962, he moved with some of his colleagues to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he continued his research on virus structures and contributed to the development of crystallographic electron microscopy. He was Joint Head of the Division of Structural Studies, 1978-86, and Director of the Laboratory, 1986-96. He was also a Fellow of Peterhouse, 1962-93.

He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1982; was knighted, 1988; was elected and served as President of the Royal Society, 1995-2000; and was appointed to the Order of Merit, 1995. He was an Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse, from 1993. Sir Aaron died on 20 November 2018.