A biochemist synthesized DNA in a test tube three years after its structure was solved

In 1956, Arthur Kornberg isolated DNA polymerase I from E. coli and used it to build new DNA molecules outside a living cell for the first time. The experiment showed that an enzyme, not magic, copies the molecule Watson and Crick had described only three years earlier. Kornberg shared the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery.

— Arthur Kornberg, Enzymatic Synthesis of Deoxyribonucleic Acid — Nobel Lecture, 11 December 1959