Aaron’s path to science is inspiring. He was born in 1926 in Lithuania to Jewish parents, but his family moved to South Africa when he was 2 years old. After a detour into premedical studies, he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and went on to receive a Master of Science degree from the University of Cape Town. Having been awarded an 1851 Research Fellowship from the UK’s Royal Commission (awarded to young scientists or engineers with exceptional promise), he was able to travel to England to study, completing his PhD in solid-state physics at Trinity College Cambridge in 1953. As Aaron himself has stated, this PhD did not lead anywhere directly, but it prepared him for things to come and sparked his interest in understanding how structures are organized.

After obtaining his PhD, Aaron moved to London to Birkbeck College, where he met Rosalind Franklin—a meeting that determined his future scientific career. With Franklin, the X-ray crystallographer who obtained the X-ray diffraction data that allowed Watson and Crick to propose the double-helical structure of DNA, he started working on the structure of helical viruses (the tobacco mosaic virus, which infects tobacco plants) by using X-ray diffraction. With that work, Aaron made the transition to biology, primarily to structural biology, in which he made multiple contributions, both in developing methods and in deciphering the structures of important protein–DNA complexes.

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