science · 15 January 2010 · 15 years ago
death
Died 15 Jan 2010 at age 82 (born 10 Apr 1927).
Marshall Warren Nirenberg was an American biochemist who shared with (Robert William Holley and Har Gobind Khorana) the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. He was noted for his role in deciphering the genetic code. He demonstrated that, with the exception of “nonsense codons,” each possible triplet (called a codon) of four different kinds of nitrogen-containing bases found in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and, in some viruses, in ribonucleic acid (RNA) ultimately causes the incorporation of a specific amino acid into a cell protein.
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