John Cornforth Biography

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World of Scientific Discovery on John Cornforth

John Warcup Cornforth received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1975 for his research on the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalyzed reactions. The prize was shared with Vladimir Prelog for his work on the stereochemistry of organic molecules and reactions. Stereochemistry is a branch of chemistry that deals with the shapes, or architecture, of molecules and the way their three-dimensional structure affects chemical properties.

The study of stereochemistry is considered vital to understanding the organic world at its most basic biochemical level. It has been called a "point of view" in chemistry, which shows how things fit together at the molecular level and how they affect such fundamental aspects of life as taste and smell. It has been specifically in this area of chemistry that Cornforth has made his contributions.

Cornforth was born in Sydney, Australia, on September 7, 1917, to J. W. Cornforth and Hilda Eipper Cornforth. His undergraduate work was completed at Sydney University in 1938, and he took his doctoral degree at Oxford University in England, receiving a Ph.D. in 1941. At Oxford, he studied with Sir Robert Robinson, a 1947 Nobel Prize winner. During World War II, Cornforth worked with Robinson on the structure of penicillin as well as the problem of chemical synthesis in steroids, compounds that are principal to the structure of cells in plants and animals.

From 1946 until 1962, Cornforth worked for the National Institute of Medical Research at the Mill Hill Research Laboratories in London. During this association, he developed his technique for studying the stereochemical processes of enzymes, whereby he was able to show the pathways of biochemical processes. In 1962, he became the director of the Milstead Laboratory of Chemical Enzymology of Shell Research at Sittingbourne in Kent, an association that continued until 1975. By this time, besides winning the Nobel Prize, he had also received numerous other awards for his contributions to stereochemistry.

Cornforth also held some academic positions. He first served as an associate professor at the school of molecular science at the University of Warwick between 1965 and 1971. In 1971, he accepted the position of visiting professor at the University of Sussex, and in 1974, he became a permanent faculty member of the Royal Society as a research professor, remaining with the university until 1982.

Cornforth's early contributions were related to the synthesis and description of the structure of many natural products (including plant hormones) and olefins (which are synthetic and used in textiles). He continued his work with the biosynthesis of steroids, such as cholesterol, and was able to trace more than a dozen stereochemical steps in the biosynthesis of squalene, a precursor of cholesterol that is widely distributed in nature.

Cornforth's key contribution to stereochemistry was his development of a technique to label hydrogen isotopes to show how a molecule becomes synthesized within a cell. Cornforth was able to detail all the chemical steps that a cell goes through before it takes its final form. He accomplished this by tracing the steps taken by acetic acid to form cholesterol.

In addition to his early collaboration with Sir Robert Robinson, Cornforth collaborated with George Popják (for 20 years) and with Professor H. Eggerer of Munich. His most notable collaboration, however, was with his wife, Rita H. (Harradence) Cornforth, who also holds a doctorate from Oxford. She worked with Cornforth for decades, coauthoring with him an important article on squalene. Rita Cornforth was an invaluable link between Cornforth and his colleagues because he suffered from deafness (he had begun to lose his hearing when he was 14 years old). By 1945, he depended completely on lip reading and on written communication.Cornforth received numerous awards for his contributions to chemistry, including the Corday-Morgan and Flintoff Medals of the Chemical Society of London, the CIBA Medal, the Davy Medal of the Royal Society, and the Guenther Award of the American Chemical Society, and in 1977 he was knighted. He has held memberships in scientific academies in Australia, the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, and England throughout his scientific career. Cornforth detailed his work in a number of publications.