22-APR-1947 :- BIRTH OF Roger D. Kornberg, biochemist , Nobel Prize Winner .

Roger David Kornberg 

(born April 24, 1947) is an American biochemist and professor of structural biology at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Kornberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006 for his studies of the process by which genetic information from DNA is copied to RNA, "the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription."

"Kornberg" was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the eldest of three sons of biochemist Arthur Kornberg, who won the Nobel Prize, and Sylvy Ruth (Levy) who was also a biochemist. He earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Harvard University in 1967 and his Ph.D. in chemical physics from Stanford in 1972. He became a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England and then an Assistant Professor of Biological Chemistry at Harvard Medical School in 1976, before moving to his present position as Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford Medical School in 1978. His closest collaborator has been his wife, Professor Yahli Lorch. He has two younger brothers:

• Thomas B. Kornberg (b. 1948)-biochemist who was the first person to purify and characterise DNA polymerase II and DNA polymerase III.
• Kenneth Andrew Kornberg (b. 1950)-architect specializing in the design of biomedical and biotechnology laboratories and buildings.