Word: nirenberg
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Dates: during 1968-1968
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...generation to the next. And one of the greatest of man's scientific triumphs has been the discovery of the method by which the genes transmit and translate the message of heredity. Last week, for their ingenious work in breaking the genetic code, U.S. Molecular Biologists Marshall Nirenberg, 41, Har Gobind Khorana, 46, and Robert Holley, 46, were jointly awarded the 1968 Nobel prize for physiology and medicine...
...Nirenberg, then an obscure young scientist at the National Institutes of Health, provided the biological Rosetta stone. After synthesizing a single helix with half-stairs that were the equivalent of only one of DNA's nucleotides-adenine (A)-he added it to a solution containing all 20 amino acids. Only one protein was produced in the solution. It consisted entirely of a chain of amino-acid molecules called phenylalanine. Thus, Nirenberg concluded, a three-letter code word made up of adenine nucleotides (AAA) was nature's instruction to the cell to use phenylalanine in building a protein...
Punched-Tape Message. Nirenberg refined his technique and began to match other three-letter combinations of nucleotides with particular amino acids. The task was also taken up independently by Khorana at the University of Wisconsin. Other scientists pitched in, and by 1965 the genetic code had been largely deciphered. Khorana was also able to determine that each of the three-letter words is always read separately and does not share any of its letters with another word. The words are read off continuously along a strand of DNA, much as a punched-tape message is read by a teletype machine...
...Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League; Pedro Gerardo Beltran, publisher of La Prensa in Lima, Peru; Livingston T. Merchant, U. S. career diplomat; J. E. Wallace Sterling, retiring president of Stanford University; and two scientists--Nobel laureate Dorothy Crawfoot Hodgkin and geneticist-chemist Marshall W. Nirenberg...
Marshall W. Nirenberg, a research chemist, is chief of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics of the National Heart Institute in Bethesda...