Roger D. Kornberg

Won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006

Roger David Kornberg (born 1947 in St. Louis, Missouri) is an American scientist and professor of structural biology at Stanford University.

Kornberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006 "for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription" which explains the process by which DNA is converted into RNA. His father, Arthur Kornberg, who was also a professor at Stanford University, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1959.

Biography
Roger was the first of three children born to Arthur Kornberg and his wife, Sylvy, who was also a biochemist working with Arthur.

Kornberg earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1967 and his PhD from Stanford in 1972, before doing post-doctoral research at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, United Kingdom. He joined Harvard Medical School in 1976 as an assistant professor in the department of biological chemistry. Kornberg returned to Stanford in 1978 as a professor in the structural biology department. He served as department chair from 1984 until 1992. He serves as the Mrs. George A. Winzer Professor in Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Kornberg is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Nobel Prize
In order for a body to make use of the information stored in the genes, a copy must first be made and transferred to the outer parts of the cells. There it is used as an instruction for protein production ? it is the proteins that in their turn actually construct the organism and its function. The copying process is called transcription.

Roger Kornberg was the first to create an actual picture of how transcription works at a molecular level in the important group of organisms called eukaryotes (organisms whose cells have a well-defined nucleus). Mammals like ourselves are included in this group, as is ordinary yeast.

Roger Kornberg's younger brother, Thomas Bill Kornberg, discovered DNA polymerase II and III in 1970 and is now a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco. In 1959, their father Arthur Kornberg received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for studies of how genetic information is transferred from one DNA molecule to another. The Kornbergs are the sixth father-son team to win Nobel Prizes.

Awards
He has received the following awards:
1997: Harvey Prize from the Technion
2002: ASBMB-Merck Award
2002: Pasarow Award in Cancer Research
2002: Le Grand Prix Charles-Leopold Mayer
2005: General Motors Cancer Research Foundation?s Alfred P. Sloan Jr. Prize
2006: Nobel Prize in Chemistry

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