Education Quote by Aaron Klug

A Nobel-level scientist casually insisting he’s “perhaps” obliged to mention that he’s spent two decades teaching undergraduates is a small masterclass in academic self-fashioning. Aaron Klug’s line reads like a footnote smuggled into a life story: not a boast, not an apology, but a calibrated reassurance that his prestige hasn’t floated entirely above the lecture hall.

The intent is practical on the surface. This is the kind of sentence you find in a CV-turned-narrative, a talk introduction, or an institutional profile where the speaker anticipates an unspoken suspicion: elite research stars can become absentee landlords of knowledge, hovering over labs while junior staff do the pedagogical labor. Klug preempts that critique. “Actively involved” is doing heavy lifting here; it’s a defensive adjective, quietly countering the idea that his role might be ceremonial.

The subtext is also about hierarchy. “As well as of course supervising research students” signals that graduate supervision is expected, almost automatic, for someone of his stature. Undergraduate teaching, by contrast, is the item that needs to be stated. That asymmetry reveals an academic culture where mentorship of future colleagues carries more status than teaching the many. Klug’s phrasing subtly refuses that value system, or at least refuses to be fully captured by it.

Context matters: Cambridge, postwar British science, and the rise of molecular biology as a prestige engine. Klug, known for painstaking structural work, frames himself not just as a producer of discoveries but as a steward of an institution’s intellectual pipeline. The sentence is modest, but the politics are clear: science isn’t only made at the frontier; it’s reproduced in the classroom.