Arthur Kornberg

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Arthur Kornberg

Arthur Kornberg (born March 3, 1918 in Brooklyn , New York City , USA , † October 26, 2007 in Stanford , California ) was an American biochemist . Together with Severo Ochoa , he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1959 "for discovering the mechanism in the biological synthesis of ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid ". One of his sons, Roger D. Kornberg , is also a Nobel Prize winner.

Arthur Kornberg's primary research interests were the chemistry of enzymes , the synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid, and the study of nucleic acids that control inheritance in animals, plants, bacteria, and viruses. In 1956 he isolated the enzyme DNA polymerase I (also called Kornberg polymerase) from the bacterium Escherichia coli for the first time .

Early life

Arthur Kornberg was born as the son of the Austrians Lena Kornberg (née Katz) and Joseph Kornberg. His parents emigrated from Galicia to New York in 1900 and married in 1904. Arthur's paternal grandfather changed his family name from Queller (also spelled Kweller) to Kornberg to avoid military service by assuming the identity of someone who had already completed military service. He worked as a sewing machine worker on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for nearly 30 years . When his health deteriorated, he opened a small hardware store in Brooklyn where Arthur Kornberg served customers as a nine-year-old.

Kornberg first went to Abraham Lincoln High School and received his intermediate diploma from the City College of New York in 1937 and his master's degree from the University of Rochester in 1941 . Kornberg had Gilbert's syndrome , which causes mild jaundice due to an increase in the bilirubin level in the blood . During medical school, he examined classmates how often this (relatively harmless) disease occurred. The results of this investigation were published in Kornberg's first scientific paper in 1942.

Kornberg did his internship between 1941 and 1942 at the Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester , New York. He then joined the armed service with the United States Coast Guard as a lieutenant, where he served as a ship's doctor . Rolla Dyer, director of the National Institutes of Health , learned about Kornberg's work and invited him to join the research team at the NIH Nutrition Institute . From 1942 to 1945, Kornberg's work consisted of feeding rats specialized diets in order to discover new vitamins.

Scientific Research

Feeding rats was not a particularly interesting job for Kornberg. Rather, his interest in enzymes grew . In 1946 he moved to Severo Ochoa's laboratory at New York University. He took summer courses at Columbia University to fill his knowledge gaps in organic and physical chemistry while studying enzyme isolation techniques on the job. From 1947 to 1953 he was chief of the enzyme and metabolism department at the National Institutes of Health. He worked on understanding the production of ATP from NAD and NADP , which later led to his work on the composition of DNA from simpler molecules.

Between 1953 and 1959 he was Professor and Head of the Department of Microbiology at Washington University . Here he continued the experiments with the enzymes that produce DNA. 1956 isolated Kornberg the erstentdeckte DNA polymerization enzyme, now known as DNA polymerase I . This secured him the Nobel Prize in 1959.

In 1960 he received an LLD degree from City College, followed by a D. Sc. Degree from the University of Rochester in 1962. From 1959 he was Professor and Executive Director of the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University . In 1995 he received a Gairdner Foundation International Award . In 1957 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences , 1960 to the American Philosophical Society and 1961 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1964 a member of the Leopoldina .

Kornberg's mother died in 1939 of gas gangrene caused by a spore infection after a routine operation on the gallbladder . This sparked a lifelong fascination with spurs in him. While at Washington University , he devoted some of his research to understanding it. From 1962 to 1970, in the midst of his work on DNA synthesis, he spent half of his time finding out how DNA is stored in spores, which reproductive mechanisms are contained and how spores generate new cells . This was not a very popular but a complex area of ​​science. Although Kornberg made progress, he eventually gave up this branch of research. In 1979 he received the National Medal of Science for Biology.

In 2006, Kornberg continued to operate a research laboratory at Stanford and regularly published peer-reviewed scientific papers. For several years his focus was on researching inorganic polyphosphates .

Family life

Kornberg married Sylvy Ruth Levy, also a biochemist, on November 21, 1943. She worked closely with Kornberg and made a decisive contribution to the discovery of DNA polymerase .

They had three sons: Roger David Kornberg (currently Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford University and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), Thomas Bill Kornberg (discoverer of DNA polymerase II and III and currently a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco ) and Kenneth Andrew Kornberg (architect who specializes in the design of biomedical and biotechnological laboratories and buildings).

Sylvy Kornberg died in 1986. Arthur Kornberg married Walsh Levering in 1988 and lived in Portola Valley in 2004 .

Publications (selection)

  • From the enzyme to the DNA to the membranes . Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz 1974, ISBN 3-515-01883-2 .
  • For The Love of Enzymes - The Odyssey of a Biochemist . Harvard University Press, Boston 1989, ISBN 0-674-30776-3 .

literature

  • Paul Berg, IR Lehmann: Arthur Kornberg (1918-2007). In: Science . Volume 318, 2007, p. 1564.
  • Renate Wagner: Kornberg, Arthur. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 782 f.

Web links

Commons : Arthur Kornberg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nicole Kresge, Robert D. Simoni, Robert L. Hill: Arthur Kornberg's discovery of DNA polymerase I . In: Journal of Biological Chemistry. Volume 280, No. 49, 2005, p. 46 ( full text ).
personal data
SURNAME Kornberg, Arthur
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American biochemist
DATE OF BIRTH March 3, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn , New York City
DATE OF DEATH October 26, 2007
Place of death Stanford (California)