Berg, Paul

Berg, Paul,

1926–, American biologist, b. New York City, Ph.D. Western Reserve Univ., 1952. A professor at Washington Univ. at St. Louis and Stanford Univ., he shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics (with Walter GilbertGilbert, Walter,
1932–, American molecular biologist, b. Boston, Ph.D. Cambridge, 1957. In 1968 he became a professor of biophysics at Harvard, where he had taught since 1959.
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 and Frederick SangerSanger, Frederick
, 1918–2013, British biochemist, grad. Cambridge (B.A., 1939; Ph.D., 1943). He continued his research at Cambridge after 1943. He won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies on insulin, accomplishing the first determination of the amino acid
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) for his work with recombinant DNA. Berg developed techniques for attaching selected parts of DNA molecules to bacterial DNA, enabling the synthesis of such proteins as insulin and interferon.

Berg, Paul

(1926– ) biochemist; born in New York City. After research on the role of tRNA in protein synthesis (1960s), he joined the faculty of Stanford University (1968) and began research on recombinant DNA (c. 1970). Although it occurs naturally, he believed that such DNA could be produced and controlled in a laboratory, and he pioneered techniques for manipulating genes. He shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry (1980).