Recollections of Arthur Kornberg (1918–2007) and the beginning of the Stanford Biochemistry Department

Arthur Kornberg died on October 26, 2007. He was one of the most remarkable scientists of our time. His discovery of DNA polymerase I (Bessman et al. 1958; Lehman et al. 1958a) and his demonstration that it faithfully copies the base sequence of a template DNA strand (Lehman et al. 1958b) led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize immediately in 1959. Earlier, the prevailing view was that enzymes function in directing a cell’s metabolism and in producing the energy a cell needs, while DNA synthesis is part of the mystery of life. In a Cold Spring Harbor Symposium paper on the structure of DNA (Watson and Crick 1953), the authors stated, ‘‘It is not obvious to us whether a special enzyme would be required to carry out the polymerization or whether the existing helical single chain could effectively act as an enzyme.’’ Arthur’s work with DNA polymerase I changed all this, placing selfreplication of genes on an equal biochemical footing with energy metabolism and putting an end to vitalism. His discovery launched a new gold rush, pointing the way as scientists raced to find enzymes like RNA polymerase, which copies the sequence of a DNA strand into RNA, and restriction enzymes, which turned out to be specific DNA endonucleases. Arthur was born on March 3, 1918. He came from a Jewish immigrant working-class family. His father had no formal education but could speak at least six languages. Arthur was precocious and graduated from the Abraham Lincoln High School in New York at age 15. When he graduated from City College of New York at age 19, he received the best science degree in his class. In college, he worked evenings, weekends, and holidays selling men’s clothing, and he saved enough to pay for the first two years of medical school at the University of Rochester. Arthur has described his story and his accidental entry into research work in an Annual Reviews chapter (Kornberg 1989a). As a medical student, he was intrigued to find symptoms of a mild jaundice in himself, which proved to be Gilberts syndrome, a difficulty in metabolizing bilirubin. His paper describing a survey of people with this slight metabolic disorder was read by Rolla Dyer, the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and this led to his being recalled to the NIH from sea duty in the Public Health Service in 1942. Arthur’s first research involved searching for missing nutritional factors in a synthetic diet fed to rats. He was converted to searching instead for enzymes while doing postdoctoral work in 1946 with Severo Ochoa at New York University. He became a passionate advocate of using enzymes to deconstruct how cells work. His creed was simple and positive: ‘‘If a cell can do it, then a biochemist can do it and I can do it.’’ His book about his scientific career was named ‘‘For the Love of Enzymes’’ (Kornberg 1989b), and he wrote guidelines for beginners on the ‘‘Ten Commandments’’ of using enzymes to dissect biological processes (Kornberg 2000).