Paul Berg

Origins and early life

Paul Berg was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 30 June 1926, the son of Harry Berg, a clothing manufacturer, and Sarah Brodsky, Jewish immigrants from Russia, and grew up in Sea Gate, at the southern tip of Brooklyn. He attended Abraham Lincoln High School, whose science clubs taught him to find answers for himself, an excitement of discovery he never lost. He graduated in 1943, served in the Navy on a submarine chaser until the end of the war, and took a biochemistry degree at Pennsylvania State University in 1948.

Work and career

After a doctorate at Western Reserve University in 1952 and postdoctoral work with Arthur Kornberg, he moved with him to Stanford in 1959 to help build its new department of biochemistry, which he chaired from 1969 to 1974. After a year with Renato Dulbecco at the Salk Institute, he set out to use the tumour virus SV40 to carry new genes into mammalian cells. In 1972 he and his colleagues inserted genes of the bacterium Escherichia coli into the genome of SV40, making the first recombinant DNA molecule, the starting point of genetic engineering.

Aware of the fears it raised, he led the call in 1974 for a voluntary pause on such experiments and organized the Asilomar conference of 1975, whose safety guidelines let the research go forward under federal oversight.

Recognition

In 1980 he received half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant DNA, the other half going to Walter Gilbert and Frederick Sanger. He never patented his findings, received the National Medal of Science in 1983, and raised more than fifty million dollars for Stanford's Beckman Center, which opened in 1989 and which he directed until 2000.

He died at his home on the Stanford campus on 15 February 2023, at the age of ninety-six, two years after Mildred Levy, his wife since 1947, with whom he had a son, John.