HOLDING COURT: On December 14, 1967, Mehran Goulian and Arthur Kornberg held a press conference at Stanford University to discuss their assembly of a functional, 5,000-nucleotide-long bacteriophage genome. Goulian recalls little of the event, and says modestly, “I assume that I said little or nothing, and I am certain that I was happy for Kornberg to be doing the talking.”CHUCK PAINTER/STANFORD NEWS SERVICE
Arthur Kornberg’s discovery of DNA polymerase in the 1950s was one of the most fundamental contributions to the newly born field of molecular biology, one that allowed him to make strings of nucleotides identical to a template and to show, essentially, how life itself is assembled.
The finding garnered Kornberg a Nobel Prize, shared with Severo Ochoa, in 1959. Yet, as he wrote in a 1989 memoir in The Scientist, there was still a piece missing from the scientific story. “For more than 10 years, I had to find excuses at the end of every seminar to explain why the DNA product had no biologic activity. If the template had been copied accurately, why were we unsuccessful in all our attempts to multiply the transforming ...
