1926-
Biochemist

Education and Early Career.

Born on 30 June 1926, Paul Berg earned a B.S. in biochemistry at Pennsylvania State University in 1948. After serving three years in the Navy, Berg returned to school, earning a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1952. He continued his postgraduate research in Denmark and subsequently in Saint Louis, Missouri, at Washington University. In 1956 he was appointed to an assistant professorship in microbiology at Washington University's School of Medicine and in 1959 accepted a professorship in biochemistry at Stanford University. It was at Stanford that Berg made the discoveries that won him the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1980.

Recombining Bits of DNA.

Berg has made a variety of important contributions to the study of biochemistry. He developed a technique for splicing deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) from different organisms together. This splicing technique has proved to be of inestimable importance...