Kornberg, Arthur, 1918–, American biochemist, b. Brooklyn, grad. College of the City of New York (B.S., 1937) and Univ. of Rochester (M.D., 1941). In 1942 he joined the U.S. Public Health Service and became (1951) medical director. He was a staff member (1942–52) of the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md. He taught at Washington Univ., St. Louis, and became chairman (1959) of the department of biochemistry at Stanford. Kornberg shared the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Severo Ochoa for their work in the discovery of the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA).

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.

Kornberg, Arthur (1918– ) biochemist; born in New York City. He began working with enzymes at the National Institutes of Health (1942–53) with his wife and lifetime collaborator, Sylvy (Levy). At Washington University (St. Louis) (1953–59), he discovered the enzyme DNA polymerase, with which he synthesized nonreplicating DNA (1957). With mentor Severo Ochoa, he received the 1959 Nobel Prize in physiology for this breakthrough in molecular biology. Kornberg moved to Stanford (1959–88), where he succeeded in creating biologically active viral DNA (1967).