John Cornforth Net Worth

Background and career

Sir John Warcup Cornforth Jr., (7 September 1917 – 8 December 2013) was an Australian–British chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1975 for his work on the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalysed reactions, becoming the only Nobel laureate born in New South Wales.

Cornforth investigated enzymes that catalyse structural changes in organic substrates by replacing specific hydrogen atoms within their chains and rings. In his syntheses and descriptions of the structure of various terpenes, olefins, and steroids, Cornforth determined precisely which hydrogen atoms were displaced by an enzyme to drive a given transformation, allowing him to detail the biosynthesis of cholesterol. For this work, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1975 with Vladimir Prelog, and was knighted in 1977.