- Person
- Marshall Nirenberg
- Lived
- 1927–2010
- Field
- Biochemistry, genetics
- From
- American
The story
In May 1961 Marshall Nirenberg and Heinrich Matthaei showed at the National Institutes of Health that the RNA sequence UUU codes for the amino acid phenylalanine. After Nirenberg presented the result in Moscow that August, the race was on to read every other word of the genetic code, and the competition was fierce.
His main rival was Severo Ochoa of New York University School of Medicine, who had shared the 1959 Nobel Prize with Arthur Kornberg for discovering how cells make RNA and DNA. Ochoa had a large, well-funded laboratory and quickly began similar experiments with synthetic RNAs. Nirenberg's team at NIH was small, and Matthaei left in 1962.
His colleagues decided to help. Aware that the work might bring the first Nobel Prize for a scientist in NIH's own laboratories, many NIH researchers set aside their own projects to assist him. The period from 1961 to 1962 became known as the coding race. Over the following years Nirenberg worked with a team of about twenty postdoctoral researchers and technicians, some pitching in from other NIH laboratories.
The team made rapid progress. They showed that poly-C, a run of cytosines, directed the making of a chain of proline, and that changing one or two letters of a triplet changed the amino acid, so that GUU, for example, coded for valine. Ochoa's group made important findings too, including that poly-A coded for lysine. In 1964 Nirenberg's postdoctoral researcher Philip Leder developed a filter-binding method that revealed the exact order of letters in each codon, greatly speeding the work.
DeWitt Stetten Jr., the institute director who had first brought Nirenberg to NIH, later called this collaboration NIH's finest hour. The effort paid off: by 1966 Nirenberg announced that his group had deciphered the 64 codons for all twenty amino acids. The Columbia biologist Geoffrey Zubay remarked that year that the pace had been miraculously fast and that Nirenberg had carried the ball all the way. In 1968 Nirenberg shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Har Gobind Khorana and Robert Holley.
The coding race became a celebrated example of a research community pulling together. It also showed what a government laboratory with steady funding could achieve against far larger competitors.
Why it matters
The coding race showed how a scientific community pulling together can achieve in a few years what might otherwise have taken decades.
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.
- 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.
- Nirenberg spoke up for persecuted scientists and peaceMarshall Nirenberg protested Brazil's 1969 purge of scientists, backed appeals against hunger and nuclear escalation, and urged ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Sources
- Marshall Warren Nirenberg Wikipedia
- Translating the Code of Life and the Nobel Prize, 1962–1968 NLM Profiles in Science
- Nirenberg and Matthaei experiment 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.