Kornberg, Arthur

(born March 3, 1918, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.—died Oct. 26, 2007, Stanford, Calif.) U.S. biochemist and physician. He studied at the University of Rochester. In 1959 he joined the faculty at Stanford University. While studying how living organisms manufacture nucleotides, his research led him to the problem of how nucleotides are strung together to form DNA molecules. Adding radioactive nucleotides to an enzyme mixture prepared from cultures of E. coli, he found evidence of a reaction catalyzed by the enzyme that adds nucleotides to a preexisting DNA chain. He was the first to accomplish the cell-free synthesis of DNA. He shared a 1959 Nobel Prize with Severo Ochoa. His son Roger D. Kornberg won the 2006 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica