Marshall Warren Nirenberg

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Marshall Warren Nirenberg
Gairdner Foundation International Award (1967)
Albert Lasker Award (1968)
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1968)
Franklin Medal (1968)
Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (1968)
William H. Nichols Medal (1969)
Scientific career
FieldsBiochemistry
InstitutionsNational Institutes of Health
Doctoral advisorJames F. Hogg
Matthaei
from 1961
Nirenberg from 1962.

Marshall Warren Nirenberg (April 10, 1927 – January 15, 2010)[1] was an American biochemist and geneticist.[2] He shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 with Har Gobind Khorana and Robert W. Holley for "breaking the genetic code" and describing how it operates in protein synthesis. In the same year, together with Har Gobind Khorana, he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University.

Biography

Nirenberg was born in New York City to a

Ann Arbor in 1957, studying hexose uptake in tumor cells with his advisor James F. Hogg.[6]

He began his

San Francisco
, California. He was also survived by his sister, Joan Nirenberg Geiger of Dallas, Texas, several nieces and a nephew.

Nirenberg was awarded the

Menachem M. Schneerson, in the nation's capital, hosted by Bob Dole and Joe Biden.[9] He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2001. He died on January 15, 2010, from cancer after several months of illness.[1]

Research

By 1958, experiments and analysis such as the

codons of the genetic code and the first demonstration of messenger RNA (see Nirenberg and Matthaei experiment).[10][11][12][13][14][15][16]

In August 1961, at the International Congress of Biochemistry in Moscow, Nirenberg presented a paper to a small group of scientists, reporting the decoding of the first codon of the genetic code.

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.

The period between 1961 and 1962 is often referred to as the "coding race" because of the competition between the labs of Nirenberg at NIH and Nobel laureate Severo Ochoa at New York University Medical School, who had a massive staff. Faced with the possibility of helping the first NIH scientist win a Nobel prize, many NIH scientists put aside their own work to help Nirenberg in deciphering the mRNA codons for amino acids. Dr.

DeWitt Stetten, Jr., director of the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases, called this period of collaboration "NIH's finest hour".[20]

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

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b Wade, Nicholas (January 21, 2010), "Marshall Nirenberg, Biologist Who Untangled Genetic Code, Dies at 82", NY Times.
  2. ^ "Marshall Nirenberg Biography". www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org. Retrieved 2018-01-09.
  3. ^ Marshall Warren Nirenberg Biography. Retrieved 18 March 2018. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  4. ^ "Marshall Nirenberg". www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org. Retrieved 2018-01-09.
  5. ^ Membership Directory, 2010, Pi Lambda Phi Inc.
  6. ^ Fee, E. (2000). "Profiles in Science: The Marshall W. Nirenberg Papers. Biographical Overview". National Library of Medicine. Archived from the original on 10 April 2020. Retrieved 9 April 2020.
  7. ^ The Marshall W. Nirenberg Papers "Biographical Information"
  8. ^ "About Us". World Cultural Council. Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  9. ^ The Marshall W. Nirenberg Papers "Letter from Bob Dole and Joe Biden to Marshall W. Nirenberg"
  10. PMID 14243527
  11. PMID 14257696
  12. PMID 14255762
  13. PMID 14237203
  14. PMID 14324538
  15. PMID 5335948
  16. PMID 5327071
  17. ^ a b Goldstein, Bob (May 30, 2019). "The Thrill of Defeat: What Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner taught me about being scooped". Nautilus. Retrieved Jan 21, 2021.
  18. S2CID 4348218
  19. S2CID 206525608
  20. ^ The PolyU Experiment. history.nih.gov

References

Further reading

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