Marshall Nirenberg Dies At 82

Nobel Laureate Marshall W. Nirenberg, 82, died of cancer on Jan. 15. His death came two months after colleagues and students past and present joined him on the campus of the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Md., for a symposium dedicated to his work and its impact (C&EN, Jan. 18, page 28).

Nirenberg came to NIH in 1957 as a newly minted Ph.D. During his postdoctoral tenure there, he continued his graduate research on sugar transport and enzyme purification. Shortly after being hired as a permanent member of the NIH staff in 1959, Nirenberg switched his research area to genetics, and it wasn’t long before that work bore fruit.

In 1961, Nirenberg and postdoctoral associate Heinrich Matthaei used a cell-free extract of Escherichia coli, a suite of radiolabeled amino acids, and synthetic RNA made entirely of uracil to determine that the nucleotide sequence UUU codes for the production of phenylalanine.

For his groundbreaking contributions toward interpreting the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis, Nirenberg was one of three researchers to share the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

One of Nirenberg's newest recruits to NIH, chemist Keji Zhao, occupied the laboratory next door to the famous geneticist. At the symposium, Zhao described "the epigenetic code discovered by Marshall Nirenberg almost 50 years ago as the paragon of scientific beauty."

Nirenberg never stopped working. Until very recently he was in the laboratory working on small-molecule screening for applications as diverse as addiction, memory, and heart and lung disorders.

Nirenberg is survived by his wife, Myrna Weissman.