Access Restrictions
Arrangement
Biography
Provenance
Preferred Citation:
Related Materials
Scope and Contents
Publication Rights
Contributing Institution:
Department of Special Collections and University Archives
Title: Arthur Kornberg papers
Identifier/Call Number: SC0359
Physical Description:
55 Linear Feet
and 400 megabytes
Date (inclusive): 1938-2007
Physical Location: Special Collections and University
Archives materials are stored offsite and must be paged 48 hours in advance. For more
information on paging collections, see the department's website:
http://library.stanford.edu/spc.
Language of Material:
English .
Access Restrictions
Search files and other personnel files are restricted. Other materials are open for
research use. Audio-visual materials are not available in original format, and must be
reformatted to a digital use copy.
Arrangement
The materials are arrenged in eight series: 1. Correspondence; 2. Research and Laboratory
Notebooks; 3. Lectures and Seminars; 4. Professional Files; 5. Class Materials; 6. Stanford
Administrative and Departmental Records; 7. Personal and Miscellaneous Papers; 8.
Audiovisual materia; and three additions.
Biography
With a research career spanning more than sixty years, Arthur Kornberg made many
outstanding contributions to molecular biology. He was the first to isolate DNA polymerase,
the enzyme that assembles DNA from its components, and the first to synthesize DNA in a test
tube, which earned him a Nobel Prize in 1959. He later became the first to replicate an
infective virus DNA in vitro. He was the primary architect and first chairman of the
Department of Biochemistry at the Stanford University School of Medicine, which under his
guidance became a preeminent center for DNA research, including recombinant DNA research.
Starting in the 1980s, Kornberg also played a key role in establishing productive ties
between academic science and the biotechnology industry.
Kornberg was born in Brooklyn, New York on March 3, 1918, the youngest of Joseph and Lena
Kornberg's three children. Emigrants from eastern Europe, the Kornbergs owned a small
hardware and home furnishings store. Arthur was "an eager and able student" and was allowed
to skip grades several times in primary school. He finished high school at age 15, and
entered the City College of New York in 1933. Despite this precocity, Kornberg doesn't
recall having any early passion for science, or interest in the natural world as a
youngster. (He collected matchbook covers rather than butterflies.) He did well in his high
school and college chemistry courses, and briefly considered an academic career in the
field. During the Depression years, however, medical school seemed a more promising choice.
Kornberg received his MD from the University of Rochester in 1941, expecting to become "an
internist with academic connections." Following his internship, he began his World War II
military service as a ship's doctor on a U.S. Coast Guard vessel in the Caribbean. Though he
often quarreled with the ship's captain, Kornberg expected to remain on sea duty for the
duration of the war.
Kornberg's career took an unexpected turn when his first medical article was published in
1942. In medical school, Kornberg had conducted a small research study into a disorder
(later known as Gilbert syndrome) characterized by excessive bilirubin in the blood and a
mild benign jaundice, because he himself had the condition. At the time of publication,
senior military medical officers, along with National Institutes of Health (NIH) director
Rolla Dyer, were desperately seeking out new information on jaundice, due to an outbreak of
jaundice induced by the new yellow fever vaccine. [To learn more about yellow fever vaccine,
visit the Wilbur Sawyer Papers on Profiles in Science.] Impressed by Kornberg's study, Dyer
arranged his reassignment to a research post in the Nutrition Laboratory at NIH in the fall
of 1942. His first project involved tracking down a vitamin deficiency in rats induced by
sulfa drugs. Studying the vitamins then known--many of which are coenzymes--Kornberg became
intrigued by the central role of enzymes in all living processes, and their immense
potential for illuminating the mechanisms of cells. In 1945, desiring to pursue studies of
the metabolic enzymes involved in adenosine triphosphate (ATP) production, he received leave
to spend a year acquiring further biochemistry training with Severo Ochoa at New York
University, and six months with Carl and Gerty Cori at Washington University in St. Louis.
It was then, he later recalled, that he began a lifelong love affair with enzymes, the large
specialized proteins that catalyze all life processes.
Several years before, Kornberg had married the other love of his life, biochemist Sylvy
Ruth Levy. They had met at the University of Rochester and became better acquainted at NIH,
where Sylvy was working at the National Cancer Institute. Apart from the six years when
their sons Roger, Thomas, and Kenneth were small, Sylvy worked full-time in Kornberg's
laboratory throughout their long marriage. The children were often with them there outside
of school hours, and two of them, Roger and Thomas, also chose careers in biochemistry.
Roger Kornberg went on to receive the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
After Kornberg returned to NIH in 1947, he established an Enzyme Section within the
Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases, and continued research into the enzymes
involved in metabolic respiration. During the next several years he became very adept at
identifying and purifying enzymes, and discovered those that make several key components of
metabolic respiration cycles. Encouraged by his success with these systems, he turned his
attention to finding the enzyme that assembles various chemical building blocks into the
nucleic acids: DNA and RNA. He began by working out the synthesis process for the individual
nucleotides, units composed of a nitrogenous base (cytosine, adenine, guanine, uracil, or
thymine) combined with a sugar (ribose or deoxyribose) and a phosphate group.
In 1953, Kornberg moved to St. Louis to head the Microbiology Department at Washington
University School of Medicine. There he continued working on the synthesis of individual
nucleotides, and by 1954 had found the enzymes needed to make all four of the nucleotide
building blocks for RNA. A colleague at Washington University had meanwhile found the enzyme
that makes the thymine nucleotide (which substitutes for the uracil nucleotide in DNA). Now
able to make the building blocks, Kornberg and his colleagues began looking for the enzymes
that would put them together into RNA or DNA.
Kornberg focused on the synthesis of DNA after learning in 1955 that Severo Ochoa and his
colleagues at NYU had apparently created a synthetic RNA from adenosine diphosphate (ADP)
(the product ultimately turned out to be not RNA, but a chain very like it). Working with
cell extracts of E. coli bacteria and radioisotope tracers, Kornberg found which
combinations of the nucleotides and other ingredients resulted in the most rapid synthesis
of DNA. By the following year he had found and purified the essential enzyme, DNA
polymerase, from E. coli, and was able to synthesize DNA in the lab. The results were
published in 1958, and Kornberg received the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
(shared with Severo Ochoa) for this work.
Shortly before the Nobel Prizes were announced that year, Kornberg had taken up a new
position as chair of the new department of biochemistry at the Stanford University School of
Medicine in Palo Alto. Stanford had approached him in 1957, offering the unique opportunity
to organize and staff the department from the ground up. Kornberg recruited most of his
Washington University faculty and staff, and a number of former postdoctoral fellows for
Stanford. Retaining the communal laboratory structure and style that they developed in St.
Louis, Stanford's department of biochemistry remained a highly productive, tightly-knit
group focused mainly on DNA research. Nearly fifty years later, six of the original
faculty--Kornberg, Robert Baldwin, Paul Berg, David Hogness, Dale Kaiser, and Robert
Lehman--were still there.
In this stimulating environment, Kornberg and his colleagues continued to identify and
delineate the workings of various enzymes involved in DNA replication. In 1967 they
synthesized a viable virus DNA, an achievement lauded by the press (to Kornberg's dismay) as
the "creation of life in a test tube." They subsequently found enzymes responsible for DNA
repair and rearrangement, and others responsible for the start and elongation of DNA chains
and chromosomes. The enzymes they discovered, which allowed the manipulation of DNA, helped
make possible the development of recombinant DNA technology and the engineering of genes and
chromosomes.
In 1991, after many decades of research on DNA replication, Kornberg switched his research
focus to inorganic polyphosphate (poly P), a phosphate polymer. Poly P is found in every
bacterial, plant and animal cell, but its functions were not well understood. Chemists long
regarded it as a molecular fossil, a remnant from earlier evolutionary stages. Kornberg
found a variety of likely functions for poly P that include regulating cell responses to
stress, and factors responsible for motility and virulence in some of the major disease
microorganisms.
In addition to his research and administrative duties, Kornberg also taught graduate,
medical, and postdoctoral students. With his own and other Stanford departments so closely
involved in the early development of recombinant DNA science, he was long interested in
building connections between academic scientists and the emerging biotechnology industry. He
was a founding partner of an innovative research institute (DNAX Institute of Molecular and
Cellular Biology) in 1980, and served on the advisory boards and councils of many
university, governmental, and industrial research institutes.
Kornberg published over three hundred scientific papers during his long career, as well as
major monographs on DNA replication, a scientific autobiography, an insider's account of the
biotechnology industry, and most recently a children's book, titled Germ Stories, based on
stories he told his children and grandchildren over the years.
Besides the 1959 Nobel Prize, Kornberg received numerous other honors, including election
to the National Academy of Sciences in 1957, election to the Royal Society of London in
1970, and the National Medal of Science in 1979. He received many honorary doctorates, and
in 1999 the University of Rochester dedicated the new Arthur Kornberg Medical Research
Building in his honor.
Arthur Kornberg died on October 26, 2007 at the Stanford Hospital, of respiratory failure.
He was carrying on his lab research until several days before his death.
Provenance
Gift of Arthur Kornberg, 1989, 2002, 2008.
Preferred Citation:
[Identification of item], Arthur Kornberg Papers, SC0359, Stanford University Archives,
Stanford, Calif.
Scope and Contents
Collection documents Kornberg's work concerning the synthesis of DNA in the laboratory, as
well as the synthetic pathways of nucleotides, and includes correspondence, 1947 to 1982;
research lab notebooks, 1947 to 1969 (which include those studies for which he received the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1959); coursework, lectures, and seminars; Stanford University
Departmental records; records concerning professional organizations; and reprints, glass
research slides, and audiotapes.
Publication Rights
Property rights reside with the repository. Literary rights reside with the creators of the
documents or their heirs. To obtain permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the
Public Services Librarian of the Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Nobel Prize winners
Nobel prize -- Stanford faculty -- Biochemistry
DNA -- Synthesis.