John Warcup Cornforth
Cornforth, John Warcup
Born Sept. 7, 1917, in Sydney. British organic chemist. Fellow of the Royal Society of London (1953).
Cornforth studied at the University of Sydney and Oxford University. From 1946 to 1962 he was on the staff of the Council for Medical Research in Great Britain, and from 1962 to 1975 he was the director of the Milstead Laboratory of Chemical Enzymology of Shell Research, Ltd. In 1975 he became a professor at the University of Sussex. Cornforth’s principal works deal with the study, through the use of labeled precursors, of the mechanism of the biosynthesis of terpenoids and steroids (such as cholesterol).
Cornforth received a Nobel Prize in 1975.