Francis crick (1916-2004) The Nobel Prize Winner

Francis Harry Compton Crick was born on June 8th, 1916, at Northampton, England. Crick was educated at Northampton Grammar School and Mill Hill School, London. He studied physics at University College, London, obtained a B.Sc. in 1937, and started research for a Ph.D., but this was interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1939. During the war he worked as a scientist for the British Admiralty, mainly in connection with magnetic and acoustic mines. He left the Admiralty in 1947 to study biology.

Supported by a studentship from the Medical Research Council and with some financial help from his family, Crick went to Cambridge and worked at the Research Laboratory. In 1969 the laboratory gained the name of Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology. In 1954 Crick obtained a Ph.D. on a thesis entitled «X-ray diffraction: polypeptides and proteins». He began to lecture at Harvard, as a Visiting Professor, and visited other laboratories in the States for short periods.

In 1947 Crick knew no biology and practically no organic chemistry or crystallography, so much of the next few years was spent learning the elements of these subjects. A critical influence in Crick's career was his friendship, beginning in 1951, with J. D. Watson, then a young man of 23, leading in 1953 to the proposal of the double-helical structure for DNA and the replication scheme. Crick and Watson subsequently suggested a general theory for the structure of small viruses.

In recent years Crick, in collaboration with S. Brenner, has concentrated more on biochemistry and genetics leading to ideas about protein synthesis, and the genetic code. In 1962 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of University College, London. He was a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1960-1961.

In 1940 Crick married Ruth Doreen Dodd. Their son, Michael F. C. Crick is a scientist. They were divorced in 1947. In 1949 Crick married Odile Speed. They had two daughters. The family lives in a house appropriately called «The Golden Helix», in Cambridge. In 1963 Crick and Watson shared the Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine.

Francis Crick died on July 28, 2004.

Arthur kornberg (1918) The Nobel Prize Winner

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rthur Kornberg was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1918 and educated in its public school. He received his undergraduate degree in science from the City College of New York in 1937 and the M.D. degree from the University of Rochester in 1941. After a year’s internship in internal medicine, he served as a commissioned officer in the U. S. Public Health Service. He was first assigned to the Navy as a ship’s doctor, and then as a research scientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, from 1942 to 1953.

He obtained training in enzymology at New York University School of Medicine in 1946 and at Washington University School of Medicine in 1947. Upon returning to Bethesda, he organized and directed the Enzyme Section. He resigned in 1953 with the rank of Medical Director, to assume the chairmanship of the Department of Microbiology of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.

In 1959 Kornberg received (with Severo Ochoa) Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering the means by which deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecules are duplicated in the bacterial cell. In 1959 he organized the Department of Biochemistry of the Stanford University School of Medicine, serving as its chairman until 1969 and thereafter as professor. He accepted the title of Professor Emeritus in 1988. From his early studies of the mechanisms of the enzymatic synthesis of coenzymes, he extended his interest to the biosynthesis of the nucleic adds, particularly DNA. Kornberg found the enzyme that assembles the building blocks into DNA, named DNA polymerase. Many other enzymes of DNA metabolism were discovered responsible for the start and elongation of DNA chains and chromosomes. These enzymes were the basis of discovery of recombinant DNA which helped ignite the biotechnology revolution.

Among his honors are memberships in the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, American Philosophical Society, a number of honorary degrees, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1959), the National Medal of Science (1979) and other medals and awards.