John Cornforth
Cornforth, John (1917-) is an Australian chemist. He shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Swiss chemist Vladimir Prelog. Cornforth won for his work on the synthesis of important chemical compounds that occur in nature.
John Warcup Cornforth was born in Sydney, Australia, to a British father and a German mother. He was the second of their four children. Cornforth spent part of his childhood in Sydney and part in rural New South Wales. By the age of 10, he experienced a notable loss of hearing as the result of otosclerosis. Otosclerosis is a disorder of the ear in which a bony growth forms around the base of one of the bones in the middle ear. The growth keeps the bone from moving and so prevents it from passing on sound vibrations to the inner ear. Cornforth's loss of hearing was very gradual over the next 10 years, so he was able to attend Sydney Boys' High School. During this time, one of his teachers influenced him to study chemistry.
Cornforth attended the University of Sydney, and although he was not able to hear the lectures, he was drawn to laboratory work in organic chemistry. He graduated with first class honors in 1937. Cornforth was one of two students awarded a special scholarship to Oxford University. The other was given to Rita Harradence, also from Sydney and studying chemistry. Cornforth and Harradence married in 1941. That year, he received his doctorate from Oxford. At Oxford, Cornforth studied with British chemist Robert Robinson. Robinson previously had taught in Sydney and later received the 1947 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on plant alkaloids.
Cornforth and Harradence often collaborated on chemical projects. During World War II (1939-1945), they became involved with research on penicillin at Robinson's laboratory. Later, Cornforth helped write the book The Chemistry of Penicillin (1949), which chronicled the international effort for the development of the antibiotic.
In 1946, Cornforth joined the Medical Research Council. By 1951, he could synthesize the group of compounds known as nonaromatic steroids. Steroids that occur in nature are vital to the body processes of living things. They include sterols, such as cholesterol; bile acids from the liver; adrenal hormones; sex hormones; and poisons in certain toads. In that same year, American chemist Robert Burns Woodward had successfully synthesized cholesterol.
At the National Institute for Medical Research, Cornforth became increasingly interested in the steroid and how it was synthesized in the cell. He, along with others, came up with the complete carbon-by-carbon breakdown of the 19-carbon ring structure of cholesterol and identified the arrangement of the acetic acid molecules from which the system is built.
In 1975, he shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Vladimir Prelog. Cornforth won the award for his work on combining chemical compounds to duplicate substances found in nature, and for his researches into stereo-chemistry. Stereochemistry is the study of the arrangement of atoms in molecules. Prelog won for his research into the stereochemistry of organic molecules and reactions. Cornforth went on to synthesize alkenes, oxazoles, and the plant hormone abscisic acid.
In 1962, Cornforth left the Medical Research Council to join the Milstead Laboratory of Chemical Enzymology. There he worked on a project in the stereochemistry of enzymic reactions. The study involved artificially introducing asymmetry in the structure of chemical compounds by substituting isotopes—different forms—of the elements that composed them. In 1975, he took a position as Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Sussex, where he worked until 1982.
In 1953, Cornforth was elected to the Royal Society and received its Copley Medal in 1982. He also received the Chemical Society's Corday-Morgan medal. He was awarded the American Chemical Society's Ernest Guenther award in 1969. Cornforth was knighted in 1977