47 years after father, son wins a Nobel, too_科技Science

 

this is the second time this week the nobel prizes have recognized the growing importance of rna, which is swiftly emerging from the shadows of its better-known cousin dna. on monday, the prize in medicine was awarded to two american biologists for discoveries that opened the field known as rna interference, or gene silencing.

 

it was also the first time since 1983 that americans had swept all three scientific nobels, in medicine, physics and chemistry.

 

dr. kornberg, who said he was “simply stunned” by the award, is the son of dr. arthur kornberg, who shared the nobel in medicine in 1959 for his work in dna information transfer. the kornbergs are the sixth father and son to win nobel prizes.

 

the younger dr. kornberg said that while others suggested he might win the prize this year, he viewed it as “improbable.”

 

but the elder dr. kornberg, 88, said he was not entirely surprised. “i’m disappointed it’s been so long in coming,” he said with a smile at a stanford news conference.

 

the process of copying and transferring information stored in genes, called transcription, is the key to keeping organisms from yeast to humans alive and functioning. disturbances in the transcription process are involved in an array of human illnesses, including cancer, heart disease and inflammation.

 

dr. kornberg said in an interview that his work had already influenced the development of drugs and therapies for various conditions, and that understanding how transcription works was central to research that hoped to use stem cells to cure diseases like diabetes.

 

dr. kornberg, who graduated from harvard in 1967 and received his doctorate from stanford in 1972, has spent most of his career in biological chemistry.

 

much of his work has focused on an enzyme called rna polymerase, which makes messenger rna and controls the process of selecting certain genes from the thousands that make up dna to duplicate at any one time. dr. kornberg’s research groups characterized how rna polymerase played a central role in the transcription process by hooking on to certain parts of the dna chain and making rna that produced exactly the protein a cell needed at the time.

 

the nobel committee said that dr. kornberg did fundamental work over 20 years on how the information stored in genes is copied and transferred to other parts of the cell. the committee also said he was the first to create pictures of that process. using a method called x-ray crystallography, he was able to have a computer assemble freeze-frame images of the enzyme at work.

 

“we’ve completed the central part of the puzzle,” he said. “now we want to create a moving picture of the process from beginning to end.”

 

dr. jeremy m. berg, director of the national institute of general medical sciences at the national institutes of health, said that honoring dr. kornberg showed the importance of taxpayer-supported basic research not focusing on a specified goal. the institute has financed dr. kornberg’s work since 1979, even when it was unclear whether the research would be successful, dr. berg said.

 

dr. kornberg, who said he had vivid memories of visiting stockholm as a 12-year-old to see his father receive his nobel, said the $1.4 million award should not mean a big change in his family’s lives.

 

“on the salary of a professor, i have mostly debts that will be settled after paying lots of taxes,” he said. “then i’ll probably replace my 20-year-old automobile. i don’t see much after that.”