Prof. Arthur Kornberg, winner of Nobel Prize in 1959 with Dr. Servero Ochoa in Physiology and Medicine died in October 26, 2007 at Stanford Hospital due to respiratory failure. He was 89 years old. He was born in Brooklyn on March 3, 1918. After attending the Abraham Lincoln High School in New York, he passed out from City College of New York with B.Sc. degree in Chemistry and Biology in 1937. He got his MD degree from University of Rochester in 1941. He published his first paper on how common the condition of Gilbert’s syndrome which is mild jaundice due high level of Bilirubin in the blood. He was also one of the patients. After finishing one year of internship in internal medicine at Strong Memorial Hospital in 1942, he joined the arm forces as Lieutenant in the United States Cost Guard as a ship Doctor. He received an invitation letter from Dr. Rolla Dyer, the Director of National Institute of Health (NIH) in Bethesda from 1942 to 1953 where he discovered new vitamins after feeding specialized diets to rats.
Arthur Kornberg became interested in enzymology. He joined Dr. Servo Ochoa’s Lab School of Medicine, New York University in 1946 and Dr. Carl Cori, and Dr. Gerti Cori who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine that year in St. Louis, Washington School of Medicine. He did summer courses at Columbia University in organic and physical chemistry and leant the enzyme purification techniques. He came back to NIH as Chief of the Enzyme and Metabolism Section until 1953. He worked on production of Adenosine tri phosphate (ATP), the multifunctional nucleotide involved in intracellular energy transfer, from Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD), and Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADP) which plays key role as a carrier of electron and participate in redox reaction.
He then joined Department of Microbiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri in 1953 as Professor and Head of Department. He isolated the first enzyme, which polymerizes the DNA, known as DNA polymerase. He was awarded with Nobel Prize because of that. After that, he organized Department of Biochemistry in Stanford University and became its executive head for 10 years. He became Professor Emeritus on active status in 1988. He then focused his research in metabolism of inorganic phosphate.
He has three sons: Roger David Kornberg (1947) (currently Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford University, and the 2006 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry), Thomas B. Kornberg (1948) (who discovered DNA polymerase II and III in 1970 and is now a professor at the University of California, San Francisco), and Kenneth Andrew Kornberg (1950) (an architect specializing in the design of biomedical and biotechnology laboratories and buildings).
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