Marshall Warren Nirenberg

Marshall Warren Nirenberg (April 10, 1927 – January 15, 2010) was an American biochemist renowned for his groundbreaking work in deciphering the genetic code, which revealed how the sequence of nucleotides in DNA and RNA directs the synthesis of proteins. In 1961, Nirenberg and his collaborator Heinrich Matthaei conducted a pivotal experiment using a cell-free system from Escherichia coli, demonstrating that the synthetic RNA polymer polyuridylic acid (poly-U) stimulated the incorporation of phenylalanine into a polypeptide, establishing that the codon UUU specifies the amino acid phenylalanine—the first decoding of a genetic codon. This breakthrough initiated the systematic elucidation of the genetic code, with Nirenberg's team identifying codons for all 20 standard amino acids by 1966 through the use of various synthetic polynucleotides to probe protein synthesis in vitro. For these contributions, Nirenberg shared the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Robert W. Holley and Har Gobind Khorana, who independently advanced the understanding of transfer RNA structure and the complete synthesis of a gene, respectively.

Born in New York City to Harry and Minerva Nirenberg, he moved with his family to Orlando, Florida, in 1939 due to his own rheumatic fever, to benefit from the subtropical climate. Nirenberg pursued higher education at the University of Florida, earning a B.S. in zoology and chemistry in 1948 and an M.S. in zoology in 1952, with his master's thesis an ecological and taxonomic study of caddis flies. He then completed a Ph.D. in biological chemistry at the University of Michigan in 1957, where his dissertation examined the transport of sugars into tumor cells using radioactive tracers.

Marshall Warren Nirenberg was born on April 10, 1927, in New York City to Harry Edward Nirenberg and Minerva (Bykowsky) Nirenberg, both of Ukrainian Jewish descent. His father owned and operated a shirt manufacturing business in New York, while his mother supported the family's intellectual pursuits. Nirenberg spent his early years in Brooklyn, where he displayed an initial curiosity about the natural world, but a childhood diagnosis of rheumatic fever prompted the family to relocate in to Orlando, Florida, seeking the benefits of its subtropical climate for his recovery.