Kornberg was born in 1928 in Germany of Jewish parents, Max Kornberg and Selma. In 1939 he left Nazi Germany, and moved to the care of an uncle in Yorkshire. Initially he went to a school for German refugees, but later to Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield. On leaving school he became a junior laboratory technician for Dr Hans Krebs at the University of Sheffield who encouraged him to study further and apply for a scholarship at the same university. He graduated with a BSc Honours in Chemistry in 1949. His interest moved to biochemistry and he studied in the Faculty of Medicine, receiving a PhD degree in 1953 for a thesis entitled Studies on gastric urease.
Career
A Commonwealth Fund Exchange Fellowship of the Harkness Foundation enabled him to travel to the USA and work in several biochemistry laboratories. He then returned to the UK where his mentor Hans Krebs had moved to Oxford University and offered him a post there. This partnership produced a paper in Nature, concerning their discovery of the Glyoxylate cycle, and also a joint book which was the first major publication on biological thermodynamics. In 1960 he was appointed to the first Chair in Biochemistry at the University of Leicester, which he held until 1975 when he was elected to the Sir William Dunn Chair of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. In 1963 he was awarded the Colworth Medal, the first person to receive it. From 1982 to 1995 he was Master of Christ's College, Cambridge. In 1995 he left the Cambridge chair to take up a position as a Professor of Biology at Boston University, USA, where he taught upper-level biochemistry. His major research area was the nature and regulation of carbohydrate transport in micro-organisms, primarily E. coli.
While at Oxford, he also met and married his first wife, Monica King, a radiographer; she died in 1989. In 1991 he married Donna Haber. They lived in Brookline, Massachusetts. Professor Kornberg was a Distinguished Supporter of Humanists UK. He was a member of the Advisory Council for the Campaign for Science and Engineering. He was editor of the Sheffield University Rag MagazineTwikker in 1947. He was President and a keen supporter of the Christ's College Boat Club while he was Master of Christ's College, Cambridge: the Boat Club has one boat Sir Hans named after him, and another Lady K after his wife. He had four children: Julia Cork, Rachel Kornberg, Dr. Jonathan Kornberg and Simon Kornberg. Julia's daughter is singer SuRie, who represented the United Kingdom in the Eurovision Song Contest 2018. Sir Hans Kornberg died on December 16, 2019.
