Arthur Kornberg

Arthur Kornberg (1918-2007), American biochemist and Nobel laureate. Kornberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, and educated at the College of the City of New York and the University of Rochester. From 1942 to 1953 he did research on enzymes at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Academic appointments followed, at Washington University in St. Louis, the University of California at Berkeley, New York University, and Stanford University.

At Washington University in 1956 Kornberg and his associates artificially produced a chemically exact but inert molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a basic substance of genes. For this achievement he shared the 1959 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Severo Ochoa. (In 2006, Kornberg’s son, Roger Kornberg, was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry—the sixth instance of father-and-son Nobel laureates.) At Stanford in 1967 Kornberg headed a team that carried his previous achievement a step further by synthesizing DNA in a biologically active state. See Nucleic Acids.

Kornberg was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Royal Society. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1979. He authored several books on biotechnology and biochemistry.