| Abstrakt: |
Marshall Warren Nirenberg was born in New York City in 1927. When he was ten years old, however, his family moved to Orlando, Florida. Nirenberg soon came to consider himself a Floridian. In 1944, he enrolled at the University of Florida, studying zoology and botany, subjects that had long interested him. While still an undergraduate, he worked as a laboratory assistant and even as a teaching assistant. While working in the nutrition laboratory, he was introduced to biochemistry, little studied then at the undergraduate level. He learned how to use radioactive isotopes to follow the course of biochemical reactions, a technique that was to prove vital to his later research. Nirenberg was graduated in 1948 but stayed on for graduate studies in biology, continuing to work in the nutrition laboratory. His master's thesis dealt with the classification and ecology of caddis flies, but, in 1952, he began doctoral study in biochemistry at the University of Michigan. His doctoral thesis concerned the uptake of sugars by cancer cells, and he afterward received a fellowship from the American Cancer Society for research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1960, he was appointed to the regular staff there. Shortly after this appointment, Nirenberg began to collaborate with German scientist J. Heinrich Matthaei. They prepared an extract from bacterial cells that could make protein even when no intact living cells were present. Adding an artificial form of ribonucleic acid (RNA), polyuridylic acid, to this extract caused it to make an unnatural protein composed entirely of the amino acid phenylalanine. This provided the first clue to the code through which RNA--and, ultimately deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)--control the production of specific types of protein in living cells. INSET: Marshall W. Nirenberg. |
