- Person
- Marshall Nirenberg
- Lived
- 1927–2010
- Field
- Biochemistry, genetics
- From
- American
The story
Marshall Nirenberg was shy and avoided publicity; the Washington Post once called him painfully modest. Yet he believed that science carried special obligations. In a handwritten note in 1966, two years before his Nobel Prize, he quoted the virologist Salvador Luria: the impact of science on human affairs imposes on its practitioners an inescapable responsibility. Once he became one of the world's most respected biologists, he used that standing on behalf of others.
In May 1969 Brazil's military government purged several of the country's leading scientists. Nirenberg and his NIH colleague Christian Anfinsen, who would win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1972, wrote to President Artur da Costa e Silva protesting the removal of Isaias Raw, Alberto Carvalho da Silva and Helio Lourenço de Oliveira. They argued that the free exchange of scientific ideas was bound up with political freedom and warned that the purge would cause serious repercussions among scientists worldwide. Nirenberg had a personal tie to Brazil: his wife, the chemist Perola Zaltzman, had come from the University of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro.
Other appeals followed. In 1975, working with the Committee of Concerned Scientists, he wrote to the Soviet leadership pleading for the release of Mikhail Shtern, an endocrinologist arrested after applying to emigrate to Israel with his family. In 1982 he and Anfinsen asked Pope John Paul II to raise the disappearance of several physicists during his visit to Argentina. The National Library of Medicine notes that such appeals did not always succeed, but that they placed real pressure on governments and may have saved lives.
He also lent his name to wider humanitarian causes. In 1981 he was one of eighty Nobel laureates who issued the Manifesto Against Hunger, calling for an end to starvation worldwide. In 1986 he joined more than 1,600 scientists in an open letter to Congress protesting the Strategic Defense Initiative as a significant escalation of the arms race. In 1997 he and 148 chemists urged the U.S. Senate to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention, and in 2000 he joined other laureates in writing to President Clinton against an anti-ballistic missile programme.
Nirenberg believed that only an informed society could make wise decisions about science. His quiet activism showed how a scientist's reputation can be spent to defend colleagues in danger and to support peace, freedom and the fight against hunger.
Why it matters
Nirenberg showed how scientists' authority can be used to defend persecuted colleagues, fight hunger and support arms control.
About Marshall Nirenberg
NIH biochemist who in 1961 read the first word of the genetic code, UUU for phenylalanine, then led the race to decipher all of it, sharing the 1968 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
More about Marshall Nirenberg
- Nirenberg's lab found genes that shape the nervous systemIn the late 1980s Marshall Nirenberg's laboratory discovered four new homeobox genes in fruit flies, NK-1 to NK-4, which help control nervous system development.
- Nirenberg uncovered a molecular basis of opiate withdrawalIn the early 1970s Marshall Nirenberg and Werner Klee showed how morphine suppresses a nerve-cell enzyme and how cells compensate, explaining tolerance and withdrawal.
- Nirenberg and Leder found how to read codon orderIn 1964 and 1965 Marshall Nirenberg's lab, with postdoc Philip Leder, devised a filter-binding method that revealed the exact letter order of genetic code words.
- Nirenberg's nerve-cell lines served labs worldwideFrom the late 1960s Marshall Nirenberg built a bank of neuroblastoma cell lines with chosen nerve traits and supplied them to scientists worldwide for decades.
- NIH colleagues rallied to help Nirenberg crack the codeIn the 1961–62 'coding race' against Severo Ochoa's large lab, many NIH scientists set aside their own work to help Marshall Nirenberg decipher the genetic code.
- Marshall Nirenberg read the first word of the genetic codeAt 3 a.m. on 27 May 1961, Marshall Nirenberg's NIH experiment showed that the RNA 'word' UUU codes for phenylalanine, the first codon ever deciphered.
- Nirenberg warned society to prepare for genetic engineeringIn a 1967 Science editorial, Marshall Nirenberg predicted humans would one day program cells and urged society to prepare to use that power wisely.
Sources
- Beyond the Laboratory, 1967–2002 NLM Profiles in Science
- Marshall Warren Nirenberg Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.