He was a winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.

He studied physics under Reginald W. James and obtained his Master of Science degree at the University of Cape Town.

In 1962 he moved to the newly built Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge.

His certificate of election to the Royal Society reads: Mathematical physicist and crystallographer distinguished for his contributions to molecular biology, especially the structure of viruses.

Development of a theory of simultaneous temperature and phase changes in steels led him to apply related mathematical methods to the problem of diffusion and chemical reactions of gases in thin layers of haemoglobin solutions and in red blood cells.

Then the late Rosalind Franklin introduced him to the x-ray study of tobacco mosaic virus to which he contributed by his application and further development of Cochran and Crick's theory of diffraction from helical chain molecules.

Together with D. Caspar he developed a general theory of spherical shells built up of a regular array of asymmetric particles.

Klug and his collaborators verified the theory by x-ray and electron microscope studies, thereby revealing new and hitherto unsuspected features of virus structure.