Medicine: Secrets of Life

In the exquisitely complex chemistry of living things, no substances are more important than two that stand on the threshold between nonlife and life: ribonucleic acids (RNA) and deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA). Nothing can live without some kind of RNA, and the kind of RNA it produces, which determines whether it will become an amoeba or a mammoth, is in turn determined by its DNA, the template of heredity. Last week two U.S. physician-scientists were named winners of the 1959 Nobel Prize ($42,606) in medicine for having synthesized giant molecules of RNA and DNA.

Severo Ochoa, 54, born in the Bay of Biscay town of Luarca, taught physiology at the University of Madrid until 1936. Then, with his family as sharply disrupted as his country by Franco’s rebellion, Ochoa left to do research in Germany and England, came to the U.S. in 1940. After a year at St. Louis’ Washington University, he joined Manhattan’s New York University, intensified his research on enzymes, the catalysts of life. In 1946 he had a brilliant post-doctoral student, Arthur Kornberg. Within ten years Dr. Ochoa and colleagues found a way to make an enzyme build up nucleic acids and, in effect, create a synthetic form of RNA. Brooklyn-born Dr. Arthur Kornberg, 41, graduated from the City College of New York at 19. Working for his M.D. at the University of Rochester, he picked up hepatitis, put the experience to good use by publishing his first paper (“The Occurrence of Jaundice in Otherwise Normal Medical Students”) while still a student. Explaining his year at N.Y.U. to learn about enzymes from Ochoa, Kornberg says: “I got tired of feeding things into one end of an experiment and watching something come out of the other without understanding what goes on in the middle.” Besides mothering their three sons, Sylvy Ruth Kornberg, M.S., has co-authored many papers with her husband, works full time in his Stanford University laboratory.

With different enzymes from different bacterial cells, Kornberg used methods outwardly similar to Ochoa’s in synthesizing a form of DNA in 1957. Chemically and physically, it behaves like a natural DNA; whether it contains a vital spark is not yet known.

Since DNAs appear to control heredity (they may be identical with genes), the ability to synthesize biologically active forms may give man new power over the production of living things. And since RNAs are essential to growth, mastery of them might supply the answer to cancer, which is uncontrolled growth. Both modest men, neither Ochoa nor Kornberg would make such claims. Said Ochoa: “Now that I have won this honor, I guess I’ll have to work harder.”