"I like teaching and the contact with young minds keeps one on one's toes"
About this Quote
A scientist as decorated as Aaron Klug calling teaching a pleasure is more than modesty; it is a blueprint for staying intellectually alive. Contact with young minds is not flattery for youth but a recognition that curiosity, skepticism, and the untrained question have a special power. Students do not accept authority as an answer; they ask why, and then why again. That pressure forces clarity. It flushes out fuzzy assumptions, reveals gaps, and compels a teacher to revisit first principles. Being kept on one’s toes is the discipline of sharpening ideas in real time.
Klug’s career gives the line extra weight. A pioneer of structural biology and winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing crystallographic electron microscopy, he worked at the heart of a field where methods and models shift quickly. He trained and led teams at Cambridge’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology and earlier collaborated with Rosalind Franklin on viruses. In such environments, advances come from cross-pollination: physicists learning biology, chemists learning computation, and everyone learning to speak each others languages. Teaching in a lab is not only lecturing; it is apprenticeship, argument, and shared problem solving. The presence of learners creates a feedback loop that keeps even senior scientists agile.
There is also an ethic here. To teach is to accept accountability. If you cannot explain a concept to a novice, you may not understand it well enough yourself. The discipline of explanation safeguards rigor and transmits standards of evidence and care. At the same time, the flow runs both ways. Fresh perspectives unsettle settled wisdom, and that disturbance is a source of renewal.
Klug’s line reaches beyond academia. Any craft risks ossification. Sustained contact with people who have not yet learned the shortcuts and cannot ignore the basics forces continual self-renewal. Liking that process is a choice, and for Klug it appears to have been a source of joy as well as excellence.
Klug’s career gives the line extra weight. A pioneer of structural biology and winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing crystallographic electron microscopy, he worked at the heart of a field where methods and models shift quickly. He trained and led teams at Cambridge’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology and earlier collaborated with Rosalind Franklin on viruses. In such environments, advances come from cross-pollination: physicists learning biology, chemists learning computation, and everyone learning to speak each others languages. Teaching in a lab is not only lecturing; it is apprenticeship, argument, and shared problem solving. The presence of learners creates a feedback loop that keeps even senior scientists agile.
There is also an ethic here. To teach is to accept accountability. If you cannot explain a concept to a novice, you may not understand it well enough yourself. The discipline of explanation safeguards rigor and transmits standards of evidence and care. At the same time, the flow runs both ways. Fresh perspectives unsettle settled wisdom, and that disturbance is a source of renewal.
Klug’s line reaches beyond academia. Any craft risks ossification. Sustained contact with people who have not yet learned the shortcuts and cannot ignore the basics forces continual self-renewal. Liking that process is a choice, and for Klug it appears to have been a source of joy as well as excellence.
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| Topic | Teaching |
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