Arthur Kornberg

I want to recognize the death of Arthur Kornberg, enzymologist and Nobel Prize winner (1959) for the discovery of how DNA polymerase works in E. coli. He was a terrific mentor and there is a large group of active scientists who came from his lab. The genetic and biochemical approaches his lab groups developed were foundational to an entire generation of molecular biology. You can read more about him here.

As a grad student at Northwestern University I worked on DNA Polymerase/DNA Primase in yeast, and was delighted to talk with Dr. Kornberg at a conference about my work. Even though I pursued another scientific direction, I can still reach back to that conversation and feel encouraged to pursue difficult science for the joy of discovery.