Word: kornberg
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Some McCarthy dropouts strike a wistful note. Says Nobel Prizewinning Biochemist Arthur Kornberg of Stan ford, who had never worked in politics before the McCarthy campaign: "I thought I could make some contribution, but it is very disappointing to have the business-as-usual people tak ing over." McCarthy's celebrity corner is largely in despair. Actor Walter Matthau calls the Humphrey-Nixon face-off "a choice between strychnine and arsenic." Paul Newman, one of McCarthy's busiest advocates at the convention, promises "a month of serious drinking" before he decides whether to support Humphrey actively, though...
Stanford's 1959 Nobel Laureate Arthur Kornberg and Biochemist Mehran Goulian began their historic synthesis with four off-the-shelf inert chemical compounds called nucleotides-the basic building block of the DNA molecule, which controls the hereditary characteristics of every living thing. To these they added one enzyme, DNA polymerase, that is known to promote the assembly of nucleotides into the typical helix-shaped strand that characterizes the DNA molecule, and another enzyme that closes the strand into a ring...
Biochemist Kornberg, who is executive head of Stanford's biochemistry department, is no stranger to molecule synthesis. In 1959 he shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine for producing the first synthetic DNA molecule. Unlike the 1967 model, however, it was biologically inactive. He has received other awards for his work with enzymes and hopes next to learn how an enzyme like DNA polymerase actually organizes nucleotides into DNA molecules. Bio chemist Goulian worked under Korn berg as a postdoctoral fellow, and is now on the faculty of the University of Chicago Medical School. Sinsheimer is an authority on viruses...
...that active DNA has been synthesized, says Kornberg, it may be possible to alter the chemical structure of the laboratory-produced material at will...
...technique could have other far-reaching effects. The polyoma virus, which produces a variety of cancers in many animals, is almost identical in size and complexity to Phi X 174. "If one can take the polyoma DNA and modify it in the test tube by implanting alternate genes," says Kornberg, "some of these could prevent the growth of cancer cells...