Berg, Paul

Berg, Paul, 1926–, American biologist, b. New York City, Ph.D. Western Reserve Univ., 1952. A professor at Washington Univ. at St. Louis and Stanford Univ., he shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics (with Walter Gilbert and Frederick Sanger) for his work with recombinant DNA. Berg developed techniques for attaching selected parts of DNA molecules to bacterial DNA, enabling the synthesis of such proteins as insulin and interferon.

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Berg, Paul

(born June 30, 1926, New York, N.Y., U.S.) U.S. biochemist. He received his Ph.D. from Western Reserve University. While studying the actions of isolated genes, he devised methods for splitting DNA molecules at selected sites and attaching the resulting segments to the DNA of a virus or plasmid, which could then enter bacterial or animal cells. The foreign DNA was incorporated into the host and caused the synthesis of proteins not ordinarily found there. One of the earliest practical results of this research was the development of a strain of bacteria that contained the gene for producing insulin. In 1980 Berg shared a Nobel Prize with Walter Gilbert (b. 1932) and Frederick Sanger.

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Berg, Paul (1926–  ) biochemist; born in New York City. After research on the role of tRNA in protein synthesis (1960s), he joined the faculty of Stanford University (1968) and began research on recombinant DNA (c. 1970). Although it occurs naturally, he believed that such DNA could be produced and controlled in a laboratory, and he pioneered techniques for manipulating genes. He shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry (1980).