Nobel Prize Recipient. Severo Ochoa, a Spanish-born American biochemist and molecular biologist, received world-wide recognition after being awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology. He shared the coveted award with Arthur Kornberg, whose son Roger D. Kornberg was the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recipient, making them the sixth father-son tandem to receive the Nobel Prize. According to the Nobel Prize committee, the two men received the award "for their discovery of the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid." He and a colleague investigated how DNA and RNA were formed and which enzymes control this process. By studying bacteria, they discovered an enzyme in 1955 that can join together nucleotides, which is the building blocks of RNA and DNA. Initially, it was thought that this enzyme assembled RNA based on information contained in DNA. This was later proven to be incorrect, although the enzyme proved to have other important functions nonetheless. Born the son of a lawyer, he was seven years old when his father died. Ochoa earned his B.A. Degree in 1921 from Málaga College. In 1927, he spent the summer studying Creatine with Professor Noel Paton at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. He published a paper on his findings in the "Journal of Biological Chemistry," starting his career as a biochemist. After becoming interested in science, he went to the Medical School of the University of Madrid, where he obtained his M.D. degree with honors in 1929. With the aid of the Spanish Council of Scientific Research, he was able to travel to Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Heidelberg, Germany to study the biochemistry and physiology of muscles under 1922 Nobel Prize recipient Otto Myeyhof. By 1931 he had been appointed Lecturer in Physiology at the University of Madrid, a post he held for four years. In 1932 he went to the National Institute for Medical Research in London, where he worked two years with Dr. H. W. Dudley on his first problem in enzymology. Upon returning to Madrid in 1934, he was appointed Lecturer in Physiology and Biochemistry and later became Head of the Physiology Division of the Institute for Medical Research in Madrid. In 1936 he was appointed Guest Research Assistant in Meyerhof's Laboratory at Heidelberg, where he worked on some of the enzymatic steps of glycolysis and fermentation. With the disorder of World War II and the Spanish Civil War, he relocated. In 1937 he held a Sir Ray Lankester Investigatorship at the Plymouth Marine Biological Laboratory in England. From 1938 until 1941, he worked on the biological function of vitamin B1 with Professor R. A. Peters at Oxford University, where he was appointed Demonstrator and Nuffield Research Assistant. In 1941 he traveled to the United States to work for a year at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was appointed Instructor and Research Associate in Pharmacology. In 1942 he was appointed Research Associate in Medicine at the New York University School of Medicine, becoming successively Assistant Professor of Biochemistry in 1945, Professor of Pharmacology in 1946, Professor of Biochemistry in 1954, and Chairman of the Department of Biochemistry. In 1956 he became an American citizen. Besides the Nobel Prize, he received in 1951 the Neuberg Medal in Biochemistry, in 1959 the Medal of the Société de Chimie Biologique and the Medal of New York University and in 1978 the National Medal of Science from the United States. He held six honorary degrees from universities in the United States, Great Britain, and South America and was a member of numerous scientific societies around the world. In 1985, he returned to a democratic, becoming a consult to the Spanish science policy authorities. The United States postal service issued in 2011 a stamp with his image. In Spain, the research center, Centro de Biología Molecular Severo Ochoa, and a hospital were named in his honor. In 1931 he married Carmen Garcia Cobian and the two are buried together in Spain.