Arthur Kornberg (March 3, 1918 – October 26, 2007) was an American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for the discovery of "the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid" together with Spanish biochemist and physician Severo Ochoa of New York University.

His paternal grandfather had changed the family name from Queller (also spelled Kweller) to avoid the draft by taking on the identity of someone who had already completed military service.

Joseph worked as a sewing machine operator in the sweat shops of the Lower East Side, Manhattan for almost 30 years, and when his health failed, opened a small hardware store in Brooklyn, where Arthur assisted customers at the age of nine.

After completing his medical training, he joined the armed services as a lieutenant in the United States Coast Guard, serving as a ship's doctor in 1942 in the Caribbean.

Rolla Dyer, the Director of National Institutes of Health, had noticed his paper and invited him to join the research team at the Nutrition Laboratory of the NIH.

He became Chief of the Enzyme and Metabolism Section at NIH from 1947–1953, working on understanding of ATP production from NAD and NADP.

I knew him; he's a genius, but he'd be unable to focus and to operate within a small family group like ours, and so, I was instrumental in establishing a department of genetics [at Stanford] of which he would be chairman.

"[11] Kornberg's mother died of gas gangrene from a spore infection after a routine gall bladder operation in 1939.

Until his death, Kornberg maintained an active research laboratory at Stanford and regularly published scientific journal articles.

Kornberg's intellectual children include I. Robert Lehman,[3] Charles C. Richardson, Randy Schekman, William T. Wickner, James Rothman, Arturo Falaschi and Ken-ichi Arai.

Thomas discovered DNA polymerase II and III in 1970 and is now a professor at the University of California, San Francisco.