Arthur Kornberg
(1918 - 2007)
Arthur Kornberg was a Jewish American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1959.
Kornberg (born March 3, 1918; died October 26, 2007) was born in New York
City. Arthur Kornberg was educated at City College in New York City.
He received at B. Sc. in 1937, followed by an M.D. at the University
of Rochester in 1941. Kornberg has an elevated level of bilirubin in
his blood—a mild jaundice known as Gilbert's syndrome—and
while at medical school he took a survey of fellow students to discover
how common the condition was. The results were published in Kornberg's
first research paper, in 1942.
From 1941 to 1942, Kornberg took an internship with
Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York. After completing his
medical training he joined the armed services as a Lieutenant in the
United States Coast Guard, serving as a ship's doctor in 1942. Rolla
Dyer, the Director of National Institutes of Health, had noticed his
paper on Gilbert’s syndrome and invited him to join the research
team at the Nutrition Laboratory of the NIH. From 1942-1945, Kornberg's
work was the feeding of specialised diets to rats to discover new vitamins.
The feeding of rats was boring work to Kornberg and
soon he became fascinated by enzymes. He transferred to Dr Severo Ochoa's
laboratory at New York University in 1946, and took summer courses at
Columbia University to fill out the gaps in his knowledge of organic
and physical chemistry while learning the techniques of enzyme purification
at work. He became Chief of the Enzyme and Metabolism Section at NIH
from 1947-1953. There he worked on understanding of ATP production from
NAD and NADP. This led to his work on how DNA is built up from simpler
molecules.
In 1953, he became Professor and Head of the Department
of Microbiology, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, until 1959.
There he continued experimenting with the enzymes that created DNA.
In 1958, Kornberg isolated the first DNA polymerising enzyme, now known
as DNA polymerase I. This won him the Nobel
Prize the following year.
In 1960, he received a LL.D. again from City College,
followed by a D. Sc. at the University of Rochester in 1962. He has
been Professor and Executive Head of the Department of Biochemistry,
at Stanford since 1959.
From 1962 to 1970, in the midst of his work on DNA
synthesis, Kornberg devoted half his research effort to determining
how DNA is stored in spores, what replication mechanisms are included,
and how the spores generate new cells. This was an unfashionable but
complex area of science, and although some progress was made, eventually
Kornberg abandoned this research.
As of 2005, Kornberg still maintains an active research
laboratory at Stanford, and regularly publishes peer reviewed scientific
papers. For several years, the focus of his research has been the metabolism
of inorganic polyphosphate.
Kornberg was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Medicine in
1959 for his “discovery of the mechanisms in the biological synthesis
of deoxyribonucleic acid” together with Severo Ochoa at New York
University.
In addition to receiving the Nobel Prize, Kornberg
was presented with the Paul-Lewis Laboratories Award in Enzyme Chemistry
from the American Chemical Society (1951), a L.H.D. degree from Yeshiva
University (1962), and the National Medal of Science (1979). He is also
a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London,
and the American Philosophical Society.
Kornberg has published several books including For the Love of
Enzymes: The Odyssey of a Biochemist and The Golden Helix: Inside
Biotech Ventures.
Sources: Wikipedia;
Stanford
University; Nobel
Prize |