Kornberg, Roger David (1947-…), an American biochemist, won the 2006 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his studies of the process by which a living cell copies the instructions for making a protein. Biologists call this process transcription. Inside the cell, the instructions for making a specific protein are carried in a gene. In transcription, the cell copies the gene’s information onto a molecule called RNA (ribonucleic acid), which is later used to produce the protein. Kornberg provided a highly detailed description of transcription in eukaryotes, organisms with cells that include a nucleus. He described transcription at the molecular level—that is, the level at which individual atoms and molecules interact with one another. Defects in transcription can lead to problems in the growth, functioning, and division of cells that underlie many diseases. Kornberg’s work therefore has important applications in biology and medicine.
Roger David Kornberg was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 24, 1947. He graduated from Harvard University in 1967 with a B.S. degree in chemistry. He received his Ph.D. degree in chemistry from Stanford University in 1972. From 1972 to 1975, he conducted research at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University in England. He taught at Harvard Medical School from 1976 to 1978. In 1978, he became a professor of structural biology at Stanford University. His father, the American biochemist Arthur Kornberg, shared the 1959 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for producing DNA (deoxyribonulceic acid) by artificial means.
See also Heredity (Transcription); Kornberg, Arthur.
