17 Facts About Arthur Kornberg

Arthur Kornberg was an American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for the discovery of "the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid" together with Spanish biochemist and physician Severo Ochoa of New York University.

In 1991, Kornberg received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement and the Gairdner Foundation Award in 1995.

Joseph worked as a sewing machine operator in the sweat shops of the Lower East Side, Manhattan for almost 30 years, and when his health failed, opened a small hardware store in Brooklyn, where Arthur Kornberg assisted customers at the age of nine.

Arthur Kornberg was educated first at Abraham Lincoln High School and then at City College of New York.

From 1942 to 1945, Arthur Kornberg's work was the feeding of specialized diets to rats to discover new vitamins.

The feeding of rats was boring work, and Arthur Kornberg became fascinated by enzymes.

Arthur Kornberg transferred to Dr Severo Ochoa's laboratory at New York University in 1946, and took summer courses at Columbia University to fill out the gaps in his knowledge of organic and physical chemistry while learning the techniques of enzyme purification at work.

Arthur Kornberg became Professor and Executive Head of the Department of Biochemistry, Stanford University, in 1959.

Arthur Kornberg's mother died of gas gangrene from a spore infection after a routine gall bladder operation in 1939.

From 1962 to 1970, in the midst of his work on DNA synthesis, Arthur Kornberg devoted half his research effort to determining how DNA is stored in the spore, what replication mechanisms are included, and how the spore generates a new cell.

Until his death, Arthur Kornberg maintained an active research laboratory at Stanford and regularly published scientific journal articles.

On November 21,1943, Arthur Kornberg married Sylvy Ruth Levy, a biochemist of note.

Arthur Kornberg worked closely with Kornberg and contributed significantly to the discovery of DNA polymerase.

Arthur and Sylvy Kornberg had three sons: Roger David Kornberg, Thomas B Kornberg, and Kenneth Andrew Kornberg.

Arthur Kornberg remarried in 1988 but his second wife, the former Charlene Walsh Levering, died in 1995.

When he was in his eighties, Arthur Kornberg continued to conduct research full-time at Department of Biochemistry at Stanford.

Arthur Kornberg died on October 26,2007, at Stanford Hospital from respiratory failure.