Paul Berg

Paul Berg married Mildred Levy in 1947 and has one son.

Paul Berg was born on June 30, 1926, in Brooklyn, New York, as one of three sons of Harry Berg, a clothing manufacturer, and Sarah Brodsky, a homemaker.

He attended the Abraham Lincoln High School and graduated in 1943. His schooling years instilled in him a keen interest in scientific pursuits and cemented his ambition to become a scientist.

He served in the United States Navy from 1943 to 1946 before furthering his education. He then entered the Pennsylvania State University from where he received a degree in biochemistry in 1948.

Proceeding to the Case Western Reserve University where he was a National Institutes of Health fellow from 1950 to 1952, he received his doctorate degree in biochemistry in 1952.

From 1952 to 1954, Paul Berg did postdoctoral training as an American Cancer Society research fellow, working with Herman Kalckar at the Institute of Cytophysiology in Copenhagen, Denmark.

He also worked with biochemist Arthur Kornberg at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri from 1953 to 1954, and held the position of scholar in cancer research from 1954 to 1957.

In 1956, he became an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Washington School of Medicine, a position he held until 1959 when he left to join the Stanford University School of Medicine as a professor of biochemistry. He would remain with Stanford until his retirement four decades later.

It was during the 1950s that Berg became seriously involved in research on RNA and DNA substances. He studied how amino acids—the building blocks of proteins—are linked together according to the template carried by a form of RNA, called messenger RNA (mRNA).

He was particularly intrigued by the structure and function of genes and experimented to combine genetic material from different species in order to study how these individual units of heredity worked. His investigations on the actions of isolated genes ultimately led to the development of methods for gene splicing of recombinant DNA. Berg then used this newly discovered technique for his studies of viral chromosomes.

Paul Berg is best known for his development of a technique for gene splicing of recombinant DNA. The first scientist to create a molecule containing DNA from two different species by inserting DNA from another species into a molecule, he made revolutionary contributions to the development of modern genetic engineering.