 Kornberg was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the eldest son of biochemist Arthur Kornberg, who won the Nobel Prize, and Sylvy Ruth (Levy) who was also a biochemist.He earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Harvard University in 1967 and his Ph.D. in chemical physics from Stanford in 1972 supervised by Harden M. McConnell.Kornberg became a postdoctoral research fellow at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England and then an Assistant Professor of Biological Chemistry at Harvard Medical School in 1976, before moving to his present position as Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford Medical School in 1978.