2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Roger D. Kornberg. The prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 4 October 2006.

The citation

The citation reads: "for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription".

The laureate

Roger D. Kornberg was born in 1947 in St. Louis, the United States, and is affiliated with Stanford University, Stanford.

Why it matters

Kornberg showed in detail how information in DNA is copied so that it can be used to build proteins. His father, Arthur Kornberg, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1959.

The prize

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.