Prof. Kornberg, the Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry, 2006 visited National Tsing Hua University and presented a public lecture on December 23^rd. This was the second public lecture featuring Nobel Laureates on NTHU campus in the last two months. Like all previous public lectures given by Noble Laureates, Dr. Kornberg attracted a large and attentive audience that overflow the auditorium.

Dr. Kornberg won the Noble Prize in Chemistry in 2006 with his path-blazing research on the process by which genetic information from DNA is copied to RNA. In his award-winning researches, "Dr. Kornberg identified the role of RNA polymerase II and other proteins in transcribing DNA, and he created three-dimensional images of the protein cluster using X-ray crystallography." (Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org)

Dr. Kornberg led a group of researchers at Stanford to develop a transcription system from baker's yeast, a simple unicellular eukaryote and used it to isolate all of the several dozen proteins required for the transcription process. Using this system, Kornberg made the major discovery that transmission of gene regulatory signals to the RNA polymerase machinery is accomplished by an additional protein complex that they nickname as "mediator." According to the Nobel Prize Committee, the discovery of the Mediator is truly a milestone in our understanding of the gene information transmission process.