- Person
- Arthur Kornberg
- Lived
- 1918–2007
- Field
- Biochemistry
- From
- American
The story
Arthur Kornberg was born in Brooklyn in 1918, the son of Jewish immigrants from Galicia; his father worked for decades in the garment sweatshops of the Lower East Side before opening a small hardware store. After training as a doctor, Kornberg became fascinated by enzymes, the proteins that carry out the chemistry of life, and believed that to understand a biological process you had to find the enzymes behind it.
In the 1950s, working at Washington University in St. Louis with extracts of the bacterium E. coli and radioactive tracers, he and his colleagues searched for the enzyme that assembles DNA from its building blocks. By 1956 they had found and purified it, and could make DNA in the test tube, copying the sequence of an existing strand. Kornberg named the enzyme DNA polymerase. The results were published in 1958, and in 1959 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Severo Ochoa. In 1967 his Stanford laboratory used the enzyme to make viral DNA that was able to infect bacteria, and later showed that DNA polymerase also proofreads and repairs DNA.
According to Stanford’s medical school, these basic studies paved the road to recombinant DNA and genetic engineering and provided the basis for many drugs now used to treat cancer and viral infections. DNA polymerases became essential tools of biotechnology. The polymerase chain reaction, PCR, recognised with the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, uses a DNA polymerase to build new copies of a DNA segment over and over; according to the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, 30 or 40 cycles can produce more than a billion copies.
PCR is used to diagnose infections, analyse forensic evidence, test for genetic conditions and study genes in laboratories worldwide. Kornberg himself argued that basic research is the lifeline of practical advances in medicine. His own discovery, made out of curiosity about how life copies itself, is one of the clearest examples.
Why it matters
DNA polymerases, first discovered by Kornberg, power PCR tests, DNA sequencing and genetic engineering used in medicine and research every day.
About Arthur Kornberg
Brooklyn-born biochemist who found DNA polymerase, the enzyme that copies DNA, laying groundwork for genetic engineering, PCR testing and DNA sequencing. Nobel Prize 1959.
Sources
- Nobel laureate Arthur Kornberg dies at 89 Stanford Medicine
- The Arthur Kornberg Papers: Biographical Overview U.S. National Library of Medicine, Profiles in Science
- Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) Fact Sheet National Human Genome Research Institute
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1993 NobelPrize.org
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