Nirenberg, Marshall Warren

Nirenberg, Marshall Warren

(born April 10, 1927, New York, N.Y., U.S.) U.S. biochemist. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He demonstrated that each possible triplet (codon) of the four different kinds of nitrogen-containing bases found in DNA and (in some viruses) in RNA (with three exceptions) ultimately causes the incorporation of a specific amino acid into a cell protein. His research earned him a Nobel Prize in 1968, which he shared with Robert William Holley and Har Gobind Khorana, whose work, like Nirenberg's, helped show how genetic instructions in the cell nucleus control the composition of proteins.

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Nirenberg, Marshall Warren 

Born Apr. 10, 1927, in New York City. American biochemist. Member of the US National Academy of Sciences (1967) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1966).

Nirenberg received the M.S. degree from Florida State University in 1952, and then worked at the University of Michigan from 1952 to 1957. In 1957 he began working at the Institute of Arthritis, Metabolism, and Digestive Diseases. Since 1962 he has headed the biochemical genetics laboratory at the National Heart and Lung Institute.

Nirenberg’s main works are concerned with the interpretation of the genetic code. He demonstrated that polyuridylic acid serves as the matrix for polyphenylalanine synthesis and that the UUU (uracil-uracil-uracil) codon determines the inclusion of phenylalanine in the polypeptide chain during protein synthesis. Nirenberg, together with R. Holley and H. G. Khorana, was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1968.

WORKS

In Russian translation:
“Geneticheskii kod (II).” In the collection Struktura i funktsiia kletki. Moscow, 1964.