Kornberg follows in father's footstep with chemistry Nobel

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2006 to Roger Kornberg of California's Stanford University for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription.

Kornberg is the son of Arthur Kornberg, who won the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his studies of how genetic information is transferred from one DNA molecule to another.

Transcription is the name give to the process in which information from DNA is copied into new strands of messenger RNA (mRNA), which then carries the information to the outer part of the cell to begin the manufacture of a protein.

According to the Nobel committee, Roger Kornberg was the first to create an actual picture of how transcription works at a molecular level in eukaryotes, organisms whose cells have a well-defined nucleus, including animals, plants and fungi.

"Transcription is necessary for all life," the committee wrote. "This makes the detailed description of the mechanism that Roger Kornberg provides exactly the kind of 'most important chemical discovery' referred to by Alfred Nobel in his will.

"Forty-seven years ago, the then 12-year-old Roger Kornberg came to Stockholm to see his father, Arthur Kornberg, receive the Nobel Prize ... Kornberg senior had described how genetic information is transferred from a mother cell to its daughters. What Roger Kornberg himself has now done is to describe how the genetic information is copied from DNA into what is called messenger RNA. The messenger RNA carries the information out of the cell nucleus so that it can be used to construct the proteins.

"Kornberg's contribution has culminated in his creation of detailed crystallographic pictures describing the transcription apparatus in full action in a eukaryotic cell. In his pictures (all of them created since 2000) we can see the new RNA strand gradually developing, as well as the role of several other molecules necessary for the transcription process.

"The pictures are so detailed that separate atoms can be distinguished and this makes it possible to understand the mechanisms of transcription and how it is regulated."

In the traditional interview with the editor of Nobelprize.org Adam Smith, Kornberg paid tribute to the US National Institutes of Health for the long-term funding this sort of research has received.

"All the work that we have done, virtually without exception, has been funded by the National Institutes of Health of the United States," Kornberg said. "We have received some funding from other sources, principally through fellowships given to postdoctoral members of the laboratory and graduate students over the years. But the principal source of funds, and what has made it all possible, is without a doubt the extraordinary support of science by the National Institutes of Health.

"[W]hat we do is so fundamental that it would not be likely to receive industry funding. It would require a very farsighted commercial organisation to invest in something which will doubtless have a payoff, but only in the decades to come."