Aging & Wisdom Quote by Aaron Klug

There is a quietly combative modesty in Klug's line: teaching isn’t framed as charity, legacy-building, or even duty. It’s training. “I like teaching” lands with the plainspoken confidence of someone who doesn’t need to romanticize the classroom to justify it. Then he flips the hierarchy. The usual story casts the professor as the giver and students as the recipients; Klug’s subtext is that young minds are the pressure that keeps the expert honest.

“Contact” matters here. It’s not “lecturing” or “instructing,” but a two-way proximity: conversation, questions, interruptions. That word hints at science as a social practice, not a solitary one. In research cultures that can tilt toward prestige, specialization, and protected authority, “contact with young minds” reads like a corrective. Students aren’t a captive audience; they’re a live wire. They ask naive questions that expose rotten assumptions, force definitions, and puncture jargon. Being “kept on one’s toes” is an admission that knowledge, even Nobel-level knowledge, gets complacent fast.

The context sharpens it. Klug built a career in structural biology and crystallography, fields where methods evolve quickly and where clarity about models and evidence is everything. Teaching in that environment isn’t just passing on settled facts; it’s rehearsing the logic of inference in public. The quote’s intent, then, is self-discipline disguised as affection: stay alert, stay exact, let the next generation’s skepticism act as your peer review.