Kornberg supplement

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Arthur Kornberg M.D.’s autobiography is “For the Love of Enzymes: The Odyssey of a Biochemist.”
The title shows the Nobel laureate’s passion for science, which he loves to share. It also says wonders of his sense of humor and art of communication that endear him to colleagues, including University of Rochester officials.
Kornberg, considered one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century, will lead the list of speakers at the grand opening of the Aab Institute of Biomedical Sciences and the academic center that bears his name, the Kornberg Medical Research Building.
Kornberg, a 1941 UR graduate, has taken several opportunities over the last decade to drive home the point that continued funding for science, especially governmental funding, is essential to future technological achievements.
Kornberg said he never imagined that the discovery that led to his winning the Nobel Prize in 1959, which he shared with Severo Ochoa–the identification of the enzyme that catalyzes the synthesis of DNA–would spur the number of advances that it has.
Kornberg’s work didn’t stop with that breakthrough, which unraveled the chemical steps by which living cells replicate DNA. He became the first scientist to synthesize DNA in a test tube, and was the first to produce an active virus in a laboratory. Many of the enzymes he isolated are the same ones used in the sophisticated sequencing and cloning techniques being developed today.
His three sons are successful researchers in molecular biology, and research groups under him at Stanford University have become leaders in the fields of genetic recombination and biotechnology.
Kornberg served as head of the Stanford School of Medicine’s biochemistry department from 1959 to last year. He now serves as professor emeritus.
He also has developed some business acumen, serving as an adviser for several companies and a principal in DNAX Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology Inc., now owned by Schering-Plough Corp.
Kornberg did not set out to be a researcher. He figured he would be a practicing physician, probably an internist. The Brooklyn native received his bachelor’s degree from City College of New York, and then went on to the UR School of Medicine and Dentistry.
During his 1941-42 internship at Strong Memorial Hospital, he noticed a slight discoloration in the whites of his eyes. He noticed the same condition in some of his patients and fellow students.
With the support and guidance of one of his professors, he conducted his first research project that resulted in a published paper. Kornberg discovered that he and the other subjects in his study exhibited a biochemical abnormality in bilirubin metabolism.
Kornberg went on to join the U.S. Coast Guard and served on a Navy ship in the Public Health Service. But his research caught the eye of superiors, and he was reassigned to the National Institutes of Health.
He began his research career there, and never looked back.
Kornberg spoke with the Rochester Business Journal about his field, the need for continued funding of basic research and the growth of the biotechnology sector. Here are some excerpts.

RBJ: Why did you give the University of Rochester your Nobel Prize?
Kornberg: I’m impressed by the initiative that is (being) taken by the UR, particularly the president of the university, Thomas Jackson, the senior vice president, Jay Stein, and the dean of the medical school, Lowell Goldsmith. They are setting out, in a very aggressive way, to advance bioscience and medical science at the university in a way that will take the program out of its previous doldrums. I’m taken with them, I’m taken with their initiative, and I want very much to contribute if I can.
RBJ: What does it mean to you to have your name on the new research building?
KORNBERG: I, as the people I mentioned before can attest, was very reluctant to have my name attached because I thought it would be more profitable and helpful to the university to have some major donor to augment the campaign. But they insisted, and to the extent that it might be helpful in the long run, I’m very happy to do it. Of course, I feel greatly honored, my family as well, to have this distinction, and I feel confident that the building will house people who will do a lot to advance science and medicine, for the benefit of the community and for the worldwide community of science.
RBJ: As you think back on your research career, what thoughts stick out in your mind?
KORNBERG: I’ve been lucky that the things I worked on attracted and sustained attention. And so DNA and its replication have been a featured element in my work. The book I wrote is called “For the Love of Enzymes.” It’s a devotion to enzymes, their structure, their function, their significance–that has been the central core of my work. And it was through that kind of orientation that I came to work on how DNA is synthesized and replicated, and then discovered the enzymes that are important in that process. To this very day, my focus is in biochemistry in general and enzymes in particular.
What is great about this culture (of science) is the discipline of science, more than the people or the mechanisms for doing it. It is science that enables us, ordinary people doing ordinary things, which when assembled reveal the extraordinary and awesome beauties of nature.
To my mind, science is the crown jewel of civilization. To quote the late Karl Popper, an eminent philosopher of science and society: “Next to music and art, science is the greatest, most beautiful and most enlightening achievement of the human spirit.” I disagree only in placing science first.

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9/10/99