The US biochemist Arthur Kornberg was best known for his pioneering, painstaking and extraordinarily elegant research on DNA, which won him the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The prize, which he shared with Severo Ochoa, was awarded for his discovery of DNA polymerase, the enzyme which triggers the replication process by which DNA produces identical copies of itself according to the template revealed by the unwinding of the DNA double helix.

This pioneering idea for the structure of genetic material had been suggested by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953 but it was merely an hypothesis until Kornberg proved it by identifying and isolating the key enzyme and unambiguously demonstrating its function by experiment.

Arthur Kornberg was born in New York in 1918. His parents, Joseph and Lena Kornberg, had moved to New York from a part of Austrian Galicia, now in Poland. From the age of 9 he helped his father to run his hardware shop in Brooklyn. He went to City College, New York, receiving his BSc in 1937 — his was the best science degree of the year. He went to medical school at the University of Rochester, qualifying in 1941.

After a year as a medical intern he joined the US Public Health Service. His first assignment was to the US Navy as a ship's doctor.

From 1942 to 1953 he was a research scientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Initially his work involved feeding specialised diets to rats to discover new vitamins. He became bored with this work and fascinated by enzymes and so, in 1946, he moved to New York University to train in enzymology, first with Ochoa at the School of Medicine, and then at Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis.

Returning to Bethesda, he directed its enzyme section until 1953, when he moved to run the department of microbiology of Washington University School of Medicine.

Six years later he moved to the biochemistry department at Stanford University School of Medicine, California. He was appointed its professor in 1969, becoming professor emeritus on his retirement in 1988. He remained active until shortly before his death, maintaining a laboratory at Stanford and publishing scientific papers. He served on the advisory boards and councils of numerous university, governmental and industrial research institutes. He was a founder of the DNAX Research Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology in Palo Alto.

He wrote several important monographs: DNA Synthesis (1974); DNA Replication (1980, revised 1992); and Supplement to DNA Replication (1982). He also wrote an autobiography, For the Love of Enzymes: The Odyssey of a Biochemist (1989) and The Golden Helix: Inside Biotech Ventures (1995).

Apart from the Nobel prize, his honours included membership of numerous learned societies in the US and beyond, and several honorary degrees.

Kornberg was an all-round individual, active outside his academic life. He enjoyed tennis, music, and travel.

He was married in 1943 to Sylvy Ruth Levy, who died in 1986. She worked with him and contributed significantly to the discovery of the DNA polymerase. In 1988 he married Charlene Walsh Levering, who died in 1995. In 1998 he married Carolyn Frey Dixon. She and his three sons survive him.

Kornberg was one of only six Nobel Prizewinners whose sons also won Nobel prizes. His son, Roger D. Kornberg, won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006.

Professor Arthur Kornberg, biochemist, was born on March 3, 1918. He died on October 26, 2007, aged 89