Kornberg, Arthur 1918-

BIOCHEMIST

Reproducing DNA.

Arthur Kornberg won the Nobel Prize for discovering the enzyme DNA polymerase, the substance that reproduces DNA in cells. Kornberg was able to produce DNA in the test tube in 1959, but it was not biologically active. The DNA he produced was based on a template from any natural DNA source. The DNA polymerase was from E. coli a common bacterium in the human intestine that could copy a DNA template from any organism.

Phi X174.

Methods to determine the sequence of bases in DNA were not exact in the 1960s, and Kornberg's test-tube DNA was not an exact copy such as living cells must produce. One of the problems of producing an active DNA was getting a good template. The E. coli DNA is four million base pairs long. It was almost impossible to get a good sample of DNA this long. So Kornberg used the much smaller DNA of a virus instead. The virus he chose was Phi X174, which...

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