Knud was born on 7 April 1941 in Bochum, a German city in the state of North Rhine–Westphalia. From 1960 to 1966, Knud studied Medicine in Tübingen and Vienna, officially obtaining his medical degree in 1967 from Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen. During his dissertation under Klaus Betke, Knud developed an assay for the detection of fetal hemoglobin and erythrocytes in maternal blood during pregnancy and delivery1. After working as a medical assistant in various hospitals for several years, Knud accepted a research scientist position within the group of Heinz-Günter Wittmann at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin–Dahlem. At the time, the major focus of the Wittmann group was on the ribosome and protein synthesis, a fundamental cellular process that would fascinate Knud for the rest of his life.

In 1970, Knud became a group leader within the Wittmann department, attained his professorship from the Technical University of Berlin in 1980 and was elected as a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 1984. After Wittmann's untimely death on 31 March 1990, Knud remained at the Max Planck Institute, as part of the Ribosomes department, together with ribosomologists Richard Brimacombe and François Franceschi. In spite of his compulsory retirement in 2006, Knud continued his research activities, initially at the Max Planck Institute and then within the group of Christian Spahn at the Charité Berlin, Institut für Medizinische Physik und Biophysik. In 2014, Knud obtained a Human Frontiers of Science Program grant to investigate ribosome assembly, the process that he had initially started investigating in the 1970s, soon after arriving at the Max Planck Institute.

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