Paul Berg Essay

On June 30th, 1926 Paul Berg was born and raised in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. In 1943, a year after the bombings of Pearl Harbor, he graduated from high school, enrolled to New York’s City College, and enlisted in the navy. Shortly after enlisting he would be called into active duty and spent the remainder of WWII as submarine chaser. After earning his doctorate degree he worked under Arthur Kornberg at Washington University, in St. Louis and would later move with Kornberg to Stanford University’s Medical Center. In time Berg’s interests moved to mammalian cells, which resulted in a one year sabbatical to study polyoma tumor virus with Renato Dulbecco at the Salk Institute. Returning from his sabbatical and back at Stanford, Paul Berg would conceive of a method …show more content…
Paul Berg’s method for inserting foreign genetic information into DNA of SV40 was truly a paradigm shift. No longer was the study of molecular biology purely observational, Dr. Berg’s discovery gave scientist the traction to synthetically modify and transduce foreign DNA into a desired host. Because of this, not much was known about this type of genomic modification. Except for the knowledge that SV40 DNA possessed the ability to insert its genetic information into a host genome and the discovery of Daniel Nathans’ that restriction enzymes cleave DNA at specific sites in DNA. To begin his experiment Berg isolated circular tritium labeled SV40 and λdvgal DNA from infected CV-1 and E. coli cells by equilibrium sedimentation in CsCl-ethidium bromide gradients, respectively. The circular SV40 DNA was then treated with RI endonuclease and found to sediment at 14.5 S in a neutral sucrose gradient. The linear SV40 DNA was then treated with λ exonuclease to remove deoxymononucleotides from the 5’ terminus, resulting in the complementary 3’ end being