Son follows in father's footsteps with Nobel win

A decade of research
Kornberg’s breakthrough was published in 2001, remarkably recent for honoring by Nobel prize standards. But it followed a decade of researching yeast cells — whose similarity to human cells Kornberg called “perfectly astounding” — in search of a method to reveal the transcription process.

In those 10 years, Kornberg was allowed to continue his research without publishing a single major finding — a rare luxury in the world of science where funders often want instant results, said Hakan Wennerstrom, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

“I guess it helps to have a father who is a Nobel laureate,” Wennerstrom said. “But he also had previous publications of the highest level.”

Jeremy M. Berg, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences in Bethesda, Md., which has supported Kornberg’s work for more than 20 years, called Kornberg’s prize “fantastically well-deserved.”

The question of how information from genes is turned into RNA is fundamental, Berg said, and Kornberg “started working on it when it seemed somewhere between ambitious and crazy” to figure out the detailed structure and functioning of the cell’s machinery for doing the job, he said.

“The last five years have been really breathtaking in terms of the details of the structures that he’s been producing and what they’re revealing about the mechanism, as well as laying the groundwork for future studies of how gene regulation works,” Berg said.

Sizing up the prizes
Kornberg is the fifth American to win a Nobel prize this year. So far, all the prizes — medicine, physics and chemistry — have gone to Americans.

Last year’s Nobel laureates in chemistry were France’s Yves Chauvin and Americans Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock, who were honored for discoveries that let industry develop drugs and plastics more efficiently and with less hazardous waste.

Alfred Nobel, the wealthy Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite who endowed the prizes, left only vague guidelines for the selection committee.

In his will, he said the prize should be given to those who “shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind” and “have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement.”

This year’s Nobel announcements began Monday, with the Nobel Prize in medicine going to Americans Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello for discovering a powerful way to turn off the effect of specific genes, opening a potential new avenue for fighting diseases as diverse as cancer and AIDS. Their work dealt with how messenger RNA can be prevented from delivering its message to the protein-making machinery.

On Tuesday, Americans John C. Mather and George F. Smoot won the physics prize for work that helped cement the big-bang theory of how the universe was created and deepen understanding of the origin of galaxies and stars.

Each prize includes a check, a diploma and a medal, which will be awarded by Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.

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