Cornforth, Sir John (1917-2013), an Australian chemist, shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in chemistry with the Swiss scientist Vladimir Prelog. He won the award for his work on combining chemical compounds to duplicate substances found in nature, and for his researches into stereochemistry, the branch of chemistry dealing with the spatial arrangement of atoms in molecules.
Cornforth and his wife, the organic chemist Rita Harradence, often collaborated on chemical projects. Harradence also helped Cornforth to communicate with others after he lost his hearing in the late 1930’s. Cornforth and Harradence wrote their doctoral theses on the production of steroids, a group of chemical compounds, including many hormones, that play key roles in bodily processes. During World War II (1939-1945), they devoted much time to research into the antibiotic penicillin. Cornforth contributed to a work called The Chemistry of Penicillin (1949).
After the war, Cornforth developed on his previous studies into the sterols (a group of naturally occurring substances that includes the chemical cholesterol). By 1951 he could duplicate the group of compounds known as nonaromatic sterols. He also performed a comprehensive structural analysis of cholesterol. Cornforth also contributed to the study of the stereochemistry of processes involving enzymes, substances that influence chemical reactions in living cells.
John Warcup Cornforth was born on Sept. 7, 1917, in Sydney, Australia. He studied at the University of Sydney and at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. In 1946, Cornforth started research work for the Medical Research Council. From 1962 to 1975, he was codirector, and then director, of the Milstead Laboratory of Chemical Enzymology. He then became a professor at the University of Sussex in 1975 and retired in 1982. In 1975, he was named Australian of the Year. Cornforth was knighted in 1977. He died on Dec. 8, 2013.
