Nobel was in the genes
Son of prize winner takes one home for genetic work
NEW YORK -- Nearly a half-century after his father was awarded a Nobel Prize, a Stanford University chemist won his own Wednesday for groundbreaking research into how cells read their genes.
Discoveries by Roger D. Kornberg, 59, have helped set the stage for developing drugs to fight cancer, heart disease and other illnesses.
At a press conference, Kornberg said the immediate application of his work is in making better antibiotics for diseases such as tuberculosis.
''There will be specific cures for several diseases in the next decade,'' he said.
Americans have won or shared in all the chemistry Nobels since 1992.
Kornberg's father, Arthur, shared the 1959 Nobel medicine prize. Arthur Kornberg, now 88, told reporters that the details of his son's work are beyond him, ''but I certainly admire it from a distance.... I've been waiting for this event for a long time, and I'm just grateful, and so is my family, that I'm still around when it happened.''
Jeremy M. Berg, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences in Bethesda, Md., which has supported Kornberg's work for more than 20 years, called Kornberg's prize ''fantastically well-deserved.''
Kornberg started doing his work "when it seemed somewhere between ambitious and crazy,'' Berg said.
AP