04/10/2026
In 1959, a 12-year-old Roger D. Kornberg watched his father, Stanford biochemist Arthur Kornberg, accept the Nobel Prize in Stockholm. Twenty years ago today, the son won one of his own.
Kornberg, PhD ’72, was the sole winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was honored for revealing, in atomic detail, how cells copy genetic information from DNA into RNA, work he pursued for two decades at the Stanford School of Medicine, where he remains on the faculty.
And 25 years ago this month, three more Stanford alumni took home Nobel Prizes.
Carl Wieman, PhD ’77, shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1995, working in Boulder, Colo., he cooled rubidium atoms to less than 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero. At that temperature, the atoms began behaving as a single quantum wave, a state that Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein had predicted 70 years earlier. Wieman later turned his attention to how science is taught, and he joined the Stanford faculty in 2013.
His partner in that experiment was a fellow alum. Eric Cornell, ’85, who studied physics at Stanford, shared the 2001 prize with Wieman and MIT’s Wolfgang Ketterle for achieving Bose-Einstein condensation. Cornell went on to a long career with NIST and JILA in Boulder, researching the physics of ultracold matter.
Barry Sharpless, PhD ’68, shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for methods that let chemists make mostly the left- or right-handed form of a molecule, a distinction that can decide whether a drug helps or harms. His key breakthrough came in 1980, while he was on the Stanford faculty. In 2022, he won again, sharing the prize with Stanford chemist Carolyn Bertozzi and Morten Meldal. He is one of only five people to receive two Nobel Prizes.
📸: L.A. Cicero, Andrew Brodhead, NASA, Christopher Michel/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
