Arthur Kornberg, winner of the 1959 Nobel Prize for medicine, died Friday at Stanford Hospital of respiratory failure. He was 89.

Kornberg shared the 1959 Nobel Prize for his test-tube synthesis of DNA. Although James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the model of how DNA is replicated, Kornberg discovered the actual chemical model of how DNA gets constructed in a human cell.

He was professor emeritus of medicine at Stanford.

"There have to be tens of thousands of people around the world today whose eyes are tearing up with the news that he's gone," said Paul Berg, professor of cancer research emeritus at Stanford and winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in chemistry. "He was an extraordinary scientist.

"His accomplishments might be called legendary. The style in which he did his science was inspirational."

Kornberg, who lived in Portola Valley, liked to refer to his scientific career as a "love affair with enzymes."

One of his sons, Roger Kornberg, shared his father's love of science. A professor of structural biology at Stanford, he won the 2006 Nobel Prize in chemistry. He was 12 years old when he accompanied his father to Stockholm for his Nobel Prize ceremony.

Kornberg was born in Brooklyn on March 3, 1918. He earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry and biology from City College of New York in 1937 and his medical degree from the University of Rochester in 1941.

He worked at the National Institutes of Health from 1942 to 1953 and then taught at Washington University in St. Louis. He came to Stanford in 1959 as chair of the new Department of Biochemistry.

Kornberg, author of several books, also wrote "Germ Stories," a children's book due to be published Nov. 15.

He is survived by his wife, Carolyn Frey Dixon Kornberg, whom he married in 1998. He was previously married to Charlene Walsh Levering Kornberg, who died in 1995.

He is also survived by sons Roger, a Stanford professor, Thomas, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, Kenneth, an architect and founder of Kornberg Associates, and eight grandchildren.

-- Don Kazak