Arthur Kornberg

Origins and early life

Arthur Kornberg was born in New York on 3 March 1918, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn: Joseph and Lena Katz had come from Austrian Galicia in 1900, and his paternal grandfather had changed the family name from Queller to escape the draft by taking the identity of a man who had already served.

Work and career

Joseph worked a sewing machine in the sweatshops of the Lower East Side for nearly thirty years, and when his health gave out he opened a small hardware shop in Brooklyn, where Arthur served customers at the age of nine. He went to Abraham Lincoln High School and City College, and qualified as a doctor at Rochester in 1941; his first published paper came out of a survey he ran among his fellow students on the mild jaundice he himself had.

After a year as a ship's doctor in the Caribbean he was called to the National Institutes of Health, spent the war feeding rats to hunt for vitamins, found the work dull, and fell instead for enzymes. He set out to answer how the cell copies its own genetic blueprint, and in 1956, at Washington University in St. Louis, he isolated the first enzyme that assembles new DNA — DNA polymerase — and used it to make DNA in a test tube for the first time.

Recognition

He shared the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Severo Ochoa. His wife Sylvy Ruth Levy, a biochemist herself, worked at his side and contributed substantially to the discovery, and one of their three sons, Roger, won a Nobel of his own in chemistry in 2006. Kornberg was still running a laboratory at Stanford in his late eighties, and died there on 26 October 2007.