ARTHUR KORNBERG

Arthur Kornberg (b. 1918) is Professor Emeritus (Active) at the Department of Biochemistry of Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1959 with Severo Ochoa “for their discovery of the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid.” Arthur Kornberg got his B.S. degree in 1937 from the City College of New York and his MD in 1941 from the University of Rochester. He served in the United States Public Health Service from 1942 till 1953 at the National Institutes of Health, and in brief leaves at New York University College of Medicine, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri and at the University of California at Berkeley. From 1953–1959, he was Professor and Head of Microbiology in the Washington University School of Medicine and from 1959 he has been at Stanford University, in 1959–1969 as Founder and Chairman of the Department of Biochemistry. Dr. Kornberg is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (London). He has received the National Medal of Science (1979), the Gairdner Foundation Award (1995), and has many other distinctions. Dr. Kornberg has been very much involved in biotechnology companies. We recorded our conversation in Dr. Kornberg's office in the Beckman Center at Stanford University on May 12, 1999…