Nirenberg, Marshall W.

Marshall Warren Nirenberg was born in New York City on April 10, 1927, to Harry and Minerva (Bykowsky) Nirenberg. In 1941, young Marshall developed rheumatic fever, so the Nirenberg family moved to Orlando, Florida to take advantage of the subtropical climate. Surrounded by "a natural paradise," during his teens Nirenberg developed a scientific and aesthetic appreciation for the natural world and became an adept observer of plant life, insects, and birds. He captured these observations through carefully written and maintained notes; these sketches and notes presaged a career in which scientific diaries filled with thorough documentation provided a constant source of inspiration for research and analysis.

In 1945, Nirenberg graduated from high school and enrolled at the University of Florida in Gainesville, earning his B.S. degree in zoology and chemistry in 1948. In 1950, he resumed his studies at Florida and took a M.S. degree in zoology in 1952, writing a master's thesis on caddis flies. Later that year, Nirenberg moved to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan. He earned a Ph.D. in biological chemistry in 1957 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.

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