Kornberg

In 1956, he joined his schoolmate Kornberg’s lab at the University of Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis, as assistant professor of microbiology.

“If I can bring my entire department, I will come,” Kornberg said, according to Berg.

At Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, Berg was one of three students, including Arthur Kornberg and Jerome Karle, who would go on to win Nobel Prizes.

In 1959, Dr. Kornberg, who that year received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, moved to Stanford University to set up a new biochemistry department and brought along his Washington University team, including Dr. Berg.

Toward the end of Humboldt County’s recent harvest season, Wendy Kornberg stood in her cannabis field outside the famed weed town of Garberville, trimming sticky buds with gloved hands while waxing philosophic into a headset about her long relationship with weed.