Arthur Kornberg (March 3, 1917-Oct. 26, 2007) was born in New York City to hardware store owner Joseph Kornberg and his wife Lena Katz, immigrants from current day Poland. Arthur worked in his father’s store, assisting customers, then graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School, and later earned a bachelor of science degree from City College of New York in 1937. Four years later he received an M.D. degree from the University of Rochester. He interned at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester and joined the Coast Guard as a lieutenant, serving as a ship’s doctor. He was recruited to the National Institutes of Health in 1942 to research the effect of different vitamins. Later, he switched to the study of enzymes.
From 1953 to 1959 he served as head of the microbiology department at Washington University in St. Louis, isolating the first DNA polymerizing enzyme, now known as DNA polymerase I, with the help of his biochemist wife Sylvy Ruth Levy, whom he had married in 1943. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1957, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1959. That year he transferred to Stanford University, where he became executive head of the biochemistry department. The Arthur Kornberg Medical Research Building at the University of Rochester Medical Center was named in his honor in 1999.
With Sylvy, who was his first wife, Kornberg had three sons: Roger David Kornberg, who like his father won a Nobel Prize (in Chemistry, 2006); Thomas B. Kornberg, a professor of biochemistry at UC San Francisco; and Kenneth Andrew Kornberg, an architect specializing in biomedical buildings and laboratories. Sylvy died in 1986. Two years later, Kornberg married Charlene Walsh Levering, who died in 1995. At the end of 1998, Kornberg married Carolyn Frey Dixon, with whom he lived until his death in 2007 of respiratory failure.
Tomorrow: John Garfield
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SDJW condensation of a Wikipedia article