Kornberg had been awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering pol I, then believed to be the mechanism of bacterial DNA replication, although in this experiment he showed that pol III was the actual replicative machinery.
Kornberg fora galardoado co Premio Nobel polo seu descubrimento da pol I, que daquela se cría que era a utilizada para a replicación do ADN bacteriano, aínda que neste experimento demostrou que, realmente, a pol III era o encima utilizado pola maquinaria replicativa.