Nirenberg, Marshall W

Marshall Warren Nirenberg was born in New York City on April 10, 1927, to Harry and Minerva (Bykowsky) Nirenberg. He earned a Ph.D. in biological chemistry in 1957 at the University of Michigan by writing a dissertation on the uptake of hexose, a type of sugar, by tumor cells. This work served as the basis of his first published article and shaped the direction of his initial studies after graduate school. Later that year, the American Cancer Society awarded Nirenberg a two-year postdoctoral fellowship to the laboratory of DeWitt Stetten Jr. at the National Institute of Arthritis, Metabolism, and Digestive Diseases (NIAMDD), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. He continued his work as a postdoctoral fellow of the Public Health Service's Section on Metabolic Enzymes at NIAMDD before joining the staff as a research biochemist in 1960. In 1959, Nirenberg began his investigations into the relationship between deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), ribonucleic acid (RNA) and the production of proteins. With J. Heinrich Matthaei, a young postdoctoral researcher from Bonn, Germany, he initiated a series of experiments using synthetic RNA. These two researchers were able to show how RNA transmits the "messages" that are encoded in DNA and direct how amino acids combine to make proteins. These experiments became the foundation of Nirenberg's groundbreaking work on the genetic code, which he first made public at the International Congress of Biochemistry in Moscow in August 1961. By early 1962, the significance of these early experiments was recognized throughout the world, after the popular media highlighted the importance of their work as a major scientific breakthrough. As a result, less than one year after he had first announced his successful experiment with synthetic RNA, Nirenberg received the Molecular Biology Award from the National Academy of Sciences. By 1966, Nirenberg had deciphered all the RNA "codons"--the term used to describe the "code words" of messenger RNA--for all twenty major amino acids. Two years later, in 1968, Nirenberg received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis." Despite his successes, by the time he won the Nobel Prize Nirenberg had turned from research on the genetic code to the field of neurobiology. He chose neurobiology because it is the only other biological system besides the genetic code that is designed for information processing.