Howard Berg

Berg was born to Esther C. and Clarence P. Berg in Iowa City, where his father was a biochemist at the University of Iowa and an expert on the physiology of non-proteinogenic D-amino acids. Berg was the husband of Mary Guyer Berg, a scholar of Latin American literature. They had 3 children. His elder son Henry became a tech entrepreneur in Washington State, his second son Alec, a comedy writer in Hollywood. His youngest, daughter Elena, studies animal behavior at the American University in Paris. ==Education and career==

Berg studied as an undergraduate at the California Institute of Technology and received a B.S. in chemistry in 1956. After graduation, he spent a year with Kai Linderstrøm-Lang at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen. Eventually he was accepted into the physics graduate program at Harvard, where he earned a Ph.D. in chemical physics in 1964, with a dissertation on the hydrogen maser directed by Nobel Laureate Norman Ramsey. Berg was an active researcher until very late in life. At the age of 87, he was awarded an NSF grant to study the stator unit that drives rotation of the bacterial flagellum being itself a rotary machine. about the biological applications of diffusion. ==Awards==

With Edward Purcell, Berg received the Max Delbrück Prize in Biological Physics from the American Physical Society in 1984 for work on the physical limits of bacterial chemoreception. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985 and a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1990 ("for the elucidation of complex biological phenomena, particularly chemotaxis and bacterial locomotion, through simple but penetrating physical theories and brilliant experiments"). Berg was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. ==References==