John Warcup Cornforth (1917-2013)

Awarded the Prize “for his work on the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalyzed reactions.”

British biochemist. Cornforth was born on September 7, 1917 at Sydney in Australia. He was educated at the Sydney University at Oxford University, where he completed his doctorate in 1941. In 1946 he joined the staff of the Medical Research Council. In 1962 he moved to the Shell Research Center to serve as Director of the Milstead Laboratory of Chemical Enzymology. In 1975 he became Royal Society Research Professor at Sussex University, where he served until 1982. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1953. Cornforth died on December 14, 2013.