Marshall Nirenberg · Science & Medicine
Genetic Code
1927, New York City, United States — 2010, New York City, United States
United States (Bethesda, Maryland — National Institutes of Health)
Marshall Nirenberg is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Genetic Code
Origins and early life
Marshall Warren Nirenberg was born in New York City on 10 April 1927 to a Jewish family, the son of Minerva Bykowsky and Harry Nirenberg, a shirtmaker. He had rheumatic fever as a boy and the family moved to Orlando for the climate, where he became a naturalist before he was a biochemist. He took his degrees at Florida and Michigan and went to the National Institutes of Health.
Work and career
By 1958 it was settled that DNA carried heredity, but nobody knew how a sequence of bases could specify a protein. In 1961, with Heinrich Matthaei, Nirenberg made a synthetic RNA consisting only of uracil, added it to a cell-free extract, and got back a chain made only of phenylalanine. UUU meant phenylalanine: the first word of the genetic code had been read. He and his colleagues then worked through the rest, matching each triplet to its amino acid, until the whole dictionary was written — the same dictionary in a bacterium and in a human being.
He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 with Har Gobind Khorana and Robert Holley, and took the Horwitz Prize the same year. He died on 15 January 2010.
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Source: Nobel Prize Medicine 1968
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Genetic Code
Source: Nobel Prize Medicine 1968
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