Marshall Warren Nirenberg

Marshall Warren Nirenberg, born in 1927, American biochemist and Nobel laureate, who is credited with experiments that made possible the solving of the genetic code. Born in New York City and educated at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Nirenberg earned a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from the University of Michigan in 1957. He was a postdoctoral fellow of the American Cancer Society and joined the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1957, where he performed research on the genetic code, protein synthesis, and nucleic acids. In 1962 he became director of the biochemical genetics section of the National Heart Institute. Nirenberg shared the 1968 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with the American biochemist Robert William Holley and the Indian-born geneticist Har Gobind Khorana; the three conducted separate pioneering research on how deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA; see Nucleic Acids) determines the structure of proteins. The three scientists demonstrated that certain triplet combinations of the four possible bases in DNA correspond to specific amino acids. A series of these special triplets in a DNA sequence instructs a cell on how to combine the appropriate amino acids to obtain a protein.