Marshall Warren Nirenberg

  Marshall Warren Nirenberg (born April 10, 1927) is a U.S. Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University.

Research

By 1959, experiments by phenylalanine, the resulting protein was also radioactive. They realized that they had found the genetic code for phenylalanine: UUU (three uracil bases in a row) on RNA. This was the first step in deciphering the codons of the genetic code and the first demonstration of messenger RNA (see Nirenberg and Matthaei experiment).

Nirenberg received great scientific attention for these experiments. Within a few years, his research team had performed similar experiments and found that three-base repeats of tRNA (see Nirenberg and Leder experiment). This greatly sped up the assignment of three-base codons to amino acids so that 50 codons were identified in this way. Khorana's experiments confirmed these results and completed the genetic code translation.

Nirenberg's later research focused on neuroscience, neural development, and the homeobox genes.

Biography

Nirenberg was born in New York City, the son of Harry and Minerva Nirenberg. He developed rheumatic fever as a boy, so the family moved to Orlando, Florida to take advantage of the subtropical climate. He developed an early interest in biology. In 1948 he received his B.S. degree, and in 1952, a master's degree in zoology from the University of Florida at Gainesville. His dissertation for the Master's thesis was an ecological and taxonomic study of caddis flies (Trichoptera). He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1957.

He began his postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1957 as a fellow of the American Cancer Society. In 1960 became a research biochemist at the NIH. In 1959 he began to study the steps that relate DNA, RNA and protein. Nirenberg's groundbreaking experiments advanced him to become the head of the Section of Biochemical Genetics in 1962. He was married in 1961 to Perola Zaltzman, a chemist from the University of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro.

Nirenberg was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1966 and the National Medal of Honor in 1968 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2001.

References

• Voet, Donald and Judith G. Voet. 1995. Biochemistry 2nd ed. John Wilely & Sons, New York.
• U.S. National Library of Medicine. "Profiles in Science: The Marshall W. Nirenberg Papers." [1]