Sir John Warcup Kappa Cornforth

Sir John Warcup "Kappa" Cornforth Jr was an Australian-born British chemist who was born in Sydney on 7 September 1917. He was the son of an English schoolmaster and a German missionary's granddaughter. He developed otosclerosis, a disease that causes progressive hearing loss, when he was about 10 years old and became completely deaf by the age of 20. He studied chemistry at the University of Sydney and won a scholarship to Oxford University, where he worked with Robert Robinson on steroid synthesis. He married Rita Harradence, another Australian chemist, in 1941 and they collaborated on various research projects throughout their careers. During World War II, he worked on the development of penicillin at Oxford and later joined the Medical Research Council as a staff scientist. He became interested in the biosynthesis of cholesterol and other steroids and devised methods to determine their structures and pathways using isotopic tracers and degradation techniques. He also studied the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalyzed reactions and elucidated the mechanisms of several important biochemical processes. He was a professor at several universities, including Oxford, Warwick and Sussex, and published over 300 papers and books on organic chemistry and biochemistry. He received many awards and honors for his work, including the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1975 (shared with Vladimir Prelog), the Copley Medal in 1982, and a knighthood in 1977. He died on 8 December 2013 in Sussex at the age of 96.