Sir John Warcup Cornforth AC CBE FRS (1917-2013) won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1975 for his work on the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalysed reactions. Cornforth was born in Sydney and attended school in Armidale and Sydney. As a student at Sydney Boys' High School he became particularly interested in chemistry. Meanwhile, over the course of his teenage years he became progressively deaf from otosclerosis. By the time he entered Sydney University at the age of 16 he had chosen chemistry as his career, partly because he believed that as a chemist, he would not be particularly disadvantaged by his complete inability to hear. He graduated with first class honours and the University Medal in 1937 without ever having heard a university lecture. After some postgraduate research in Sydney, Cornforth took up a scholarship to Oxford. The winner of the second scholarship in 1939 was Rita Harradence, also an organic chemist. Cornforth and Harradence were to marry in 1941. They have three children, and have lived and worked together in England all their lives. Once he had completed his doctorate on steroid synthesis, Cornforth worked on the chemistry of penicillin, later co-writing The Chemistry of Penicillin (1949). After the war, he collaborated on a successful chemical synthesis of cholesterol. He then turned to the work for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the biosynthesis of cholesterol from acetic acid. Accepting the Nobel Prize he said that 'it must, I think, be rare to be rewarded so generously for work that was so purely a pleasure in planning and execution.' Cornforth was elected to the Royal Society in 1953 and has earned its Davy, Royal and Copley medals. Knighted in 1977, he has received many honorary doctorates, returning to Australia to accept one from the University of Sydney in 1985. Cornforth continued his life's work on the relationship between enzyme structure and function at the University of Sussex, passing away at the age of 96.
