Freeze-Frame Photos of Key Process in Cell DNA Win Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Stanford Researcher

By SUSAN BROWN

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Roger D. Kornberg of Stanford University Medical School has won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for capturing finely detailed images that show how molecules read genes, the Swedish Academy of Sciences announced this morning.

Genes are merely sets of instructions for making proteins -- the building blocks of organisms and the molecules needed for breathing, digestion, and other activities that keep us alive. But in the class of living things called eukaryotes, those instructions are kept tightly bound in a packet called the nucleus of the cell. To send the genetic recipes out of the nucleus, an enzyme copies a gene's DNA to create a smaller molecule, called messenger RNA, which can carry the instructions to the rest of the body. The process is called transcription.

Mr. Kornberg has used a technique called crystallography to create pictures of transcription so detailed that individual atoms can be seen. His images show the enzyme holding a DNA molecule in position and creating precise pockets where only the next correct building block of the copy molecule, messenger RNA, will fit. After each new piece of RNA is added, a springlike structure in the enzyme nudges the DNA forward a notch so that the next letter of the genetic code can be read.

Crystallography is a well-established technique that was used to determine the double-helix structure of DNA, a feat that earned Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. What sets Mr. Kornberg's work apart is his success in capturing a freeze-frame shot of the molecules in action, which he achieved through a detailed knowledge of the biochemical process.

Mr. Kornberg, 59, will return to Stockholm on December 10 to receive the prize, which is worth approximately $1.4-million. He first attended the award ceremony as a 12-year-old, in 1959, to see his father, Arthur Kornberg, receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work on how DNA is copied when one cell divides in two. It's not the first instance, however, of a parent and a child winning Nobel prizes. There have been several others, including Niels Bohr (1922, physics) and his son, Aage (1975, physics).

This is the second Nobel Prize for Stanford's Medical School this year. On Monday the Nobel Foundation announced that Andrew Z. Fire, also of Stanford, will share this year's prize for physiology or medicine.

More information about the prize winner is available on the Nobel Web site.

Other news of the 2006 Nobel Prizes:

• Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to 2 American Cosmologists for Findings on Universe's Infancy (10/3/2006)

• Nobel Prize Goes to 2 Americans for Discovery of Key Control of Cell's Genetic Workings (10/2/2006)