The Gairdner Foundation offers its congratulations to Roger Kornberg who has been awarded the 2006 Nobel chemistry prize "for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription."

The Swedish Academy of Sciences said Roger Kornberg's research into how ribonucleic acid, RNA, moves genetic information around the body was of "fundamental medical importance."

"Forty-seven years ago, the then twelve-year-old Roger Kornberg came to Stockholm to see his father, Arthur Kornberg, receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1959) for his studies of how genetic information is transferred from one DNA-molecule to another. Kornberg senior had described how genetic information is transferred from a mother cell to its daughters. What Roger Kornberg himself has now done is to describe how the genetic information is copied from DNA into what is called messenger-RNA. The messenger-RNA carries the information out of the cell nucleus so that it can be used to construct the proteins."

Kornberg is the third recipient of the Gairdner Foundation's international award to win a Nobel this week. (Dr. Andrew Z. Fire and Dr. Craig C. Mello were jointly awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of "RNA interference - gene silencing by double-stranded RNA.")

In 1995 Roger Kornberg's father, Arthur Kornberg, received the Gairdner International Award "for fundamental contributions to our understanding of the replication of DNA."

Five years later, in 2000, The Gairdner Foundation jointly recognized the work of Roger D. Kornberg and Robert G. Roeder "for their studies on the transcription machinery and elucidation of the basic mechanisms of transcription in eukaryotic cells."

Arthur and Roger Kornberg are the sixth set of father-and-son Nobel Laureates, and the first set of Gairdner International Award Laureates.

This brings to 68 the number of Gairdner Awardees who have subsequently been recognized by the Nobel Institute.