Marshall W. Nirenberg

Marshall Nirenberg married Perola Zaltzman, a chemist from the University of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, in 1961. His wife died in 2001 after 40 years of marriage.

He tied the knot for the second time with Myrna M. Weissman, Professor of Epidemiology and Psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 2005. He had four stepchildren from this marriage.

He suffered from cancer during his last months and died on January 15, 2010, aged 82.

Marshall Warren Nirenberg was born on April 10, 1927, in New York City, to Minerva (Bykowsky) and Harry Edward Nirenberg, a shirtmaker. His family shifted to Florida when he was a young boy.

He developed an interest in biology early on. He enrolled at the University of Florida at Gainesville and earned his B. Sc. degree in 1948 and a master's degree in zoology in 1952. He was also a member of the Pi Lambda Phi Fraternity.

As a college student he became interested in biochemistry. He furthered his education at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and earned his doctorate from the Department of Biological Chemistry in 1957. His Ph.D. thesis was on the study of a permease for hexose transport in ascites tumor cells.

In 1957, he began his postdoctoral work with DeWitt Stetten Jr., and with William Jakoby at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a fellow of the American Cancer Society (then called the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases). After a couple of years he was made a research biochemist there.

He began to study the steps that relate DNA, RNA and protein in 1959. By this time, previous experiments by other scientists had had shown DNA to be the molecule of genetic information. However, it was not known how DNA directed the expression of proteins, or what role RNA had in these processes.

Nirenberg teamed up with his colleague, the German scientist Heinrich Matthaei, to solve the genetic code and demonstrated that messenger RNA is required for protein synthesis and that synthetic messenger RNA preparations can be used to decipher various aspects of the genetic code.

He was able to establish the rules by which the genetic information in DNA is translated into proteins, and identified the particular codons—a codon is a sequence of three chemical units of DNA—that specify each of the 20 amino acid units of which protein molecules are constructed.

He presented his findings before a small group of scientists at the International Congress of Biochemistry in Moscow in 1961. His discoveries were of great significance to the scientific fraternity and he quickly gained attention for the work he was doing.

Marshall Nirenberg in collaboration with Heinrich Matthaei became the first team to elucidate the nature of a codon, in 1961, at the National Institutes of Health. Using a cell-free system to translate a poly-uracil RNA sequence, they discovered that the polypeptide that they had synthesized consisted of only the amino acid phenylalanine. This discovery led to the deduction that the codon UUU specified the amino acid phenylalanine.