Roger Kornberg!!!At the age of 19 Roger Kornberg coauthored a paper with, among others, his father Arthur Kornberg and Paul Berg. This obscure paper, 'On the heterogeneity of the deoxyribonucleic acid associated with crystalline yeast cytochrome b2'1, has the extraordinary pedigree of having three Nobel laureates among its authorship. Kornberg senior won a medical Nobel in 1959 (for discovering the mechanisms behind DNA and RNA synthesis), Berg took the chemistry prize in 1980, and now Kornberg junior, too, has snapped up a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
The award is for his work in deciphering the molecular details of transcription — the process that controls the transfer of genetic information from DNA to RNA, which is then used to drive the protein-making parts of the cell.
Kornberg, a professor of structural biology at Stanford University, California (where his father is an active emeritus professor), had his major breakthrough in 2001, when he solved the structure of RNA polymerase II — an enzyme that helps messenger RNA take information from DNA. By exposing crystals of the polymerase, extracted from yeast, to a brilliant beam of X-rays, he was able to painstakingly determine their structure.
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