Two pioneers pass into history

Leslie Orgel (Nature obit), pioneer of ligand field theory and origin of life studies, and Arthur Kornberg (Mol. Cell obit), who "never met a dull enzyme". Kornberg must have felt satisfied, now that his son also won the Nobel Prize.

Kornberg goes nano

Roger Kornberg is a remarkably versatile man. After the discovery of the structure of the gigantic transcription RNA polymerase complex that bagged him a Nobel Prize last year (and brought in shouts of "No chemistry Nobel to a biologist!"), he has now unravelled the structure of a gold-thiolate cluster at the exquisite resolution of 1.1 A, clearly a more "pure" chemistry achievement. The paper made the front page of this week's Science and has been called a tour de force.

For anyone liking crystals this will be delicious. The pictures in the SuppInfo are even better. The structure may lead to a revision of other previously thought structural notions.

Commentary
Paper DOI: 10.1126/science.1148624