Dr. Arthur Kornberg was a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist. He was raised in New York by Jewish immigrant parents. He was educated in the Brooklyn public school system. He earned his undergraduate degree in science from the City College of New York in 1937, and his medical degree from the University of Rochester in 1941. He served in the U.S. Public Health Service, which led to his first research opportunity when he was assigned to the National Institutes of Health from 1942-1953. He began research on enzymes, which led him to discover DNA polymerase, an enzyme needed to create DNA. He and fellow biochemist Severo Ochoa won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery in 1959. Kornberg went on to help found Stanford University’s biochemistry department, serving as its chair and later as a professor. In this interview, he discusses all this as well as his early work at the University of Washington, St. Louis ( C.B. van Niel's microbiology course, faculty, Erwin Chargaff, nucleotide chain synthesis research, DNA as genetic material), the creation of his biotechnology company, DNAX, and the commercial potential of biochemistry.