Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Genetic code, DNA, is copied by an Enzyme

this year's winner of the 2006 Nobel Chemistry Prize, has been immersed in research since childhood and comes from a family that lives and breathes science.

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Kornberg is not a stranger to the Nobels either. In 1959, as a wide-eyed 12-year-old, he accompanied his father Arthur to Stockholm to see him receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

At the time of his father's award, Kornberg junior was already interested in science.

"Science was part of our conversations at the dinner table and part of our afternoon and weekend activities ... and the joy of science was completely natural for me and my brothers," Kornberg once told a science journal.

Arthur Kornberg, now in his 80s, was honoured for advancing understanding on how genetic information is transferred from a mother cell to its daughters.

The younger Kornberg's achievement was to portray how the genetic code, DNA, is copied by an enzyme and the copy is then stored in the outer part of the cell, in a process called transcription.

His mother Sylvy Ruth Levy was also a biochemist of note and contributed significantly to her husband's discovery of DNA polymerase, the enzyme that assembles the building blocks into DNA.

The day after her husband was awarded the Nobel prize, she was quoted in a newspaper as saying "I was robbed".

Born in Saint-Louis in 1947, Roger D. Kornberg is the eldest of three brothers.

Thomas is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California in San Francisco.

Even Kenneth, the youngest of the trio, has not entirely escaped the science bug. Although an architect, he specialises in laboratory design.

Roger Kornberg gained a degree in chemistry at Havard and earned his PhD, also in chemistry, from Stanford University.

Following postdoctoral work at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge, England, in 1978, he joined the staff there.

He later became part of the faculty in the Department of Biological Chemistry at Harvard Medical School in the United States. He returned to Stanford in 1984, where he worked as professor of structural biology until 2002.

The following year he took up his current post as professor of medicine at Stanford University Medical School in California.

Kornberg is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.