Anderson,
W. French
W. French Anderson (1943- ), known as the Father
of Gene Therapy, trained with Marshall
Nirenberg at
NIH. Anderson has a B.A. degree in biochemical
sciences from Harvard, a master's degree
in
natural sciences from Cambridge University in
England, and an M.D. from Harvard Medical
School. As chief of the molecular hematology
branch at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood
Institute at NIH, Anderson spent twenty-seven
years doing gene therapy research. He became
director of the gene therapy laboratories and
professor of biochemistry and pediatrics at the
University of Southern California School of Medicine,
and his efforts led to the first human gene
therapy trials in 1990.
Bernfield,
Merton
Merton Bernfield (1928-2002) served
as a postdoctoral fellow in Marshall Nirenberg's
laboratory at NIH, helping to
figure out the complete genetic code. Bernfield
earned his bachelor's, master's,
and medical
degrees at the University of Illinois and
did his training in pediatrics at the Cornell
Medical
Center in New York City. He came to NIH in
1961 to work with Nirenberg and others in
their
quest to finish the coding chart. Bernfield
served for twenty-two years on the faculty
at Stanford
University and joined the staff of Harvard
Medical School in 1989 where he is a professor
of
pediatrics and professor of cell biology.
His research has focused on how the material
outside
the cell affects the cell itself.
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Crick,
Francis
Francis Crick (1916- )
shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 for his joint
discovery of the double
helical shape of DNA and went on to study
the brain. Crick was born in Northampton,
England,
and, after graduating from college, served
as a scientist for the British Admiralty
during World
War II. He began his Ph.D. work at Cambridge
University in 1947 and was still a doctoral
student at the time of his and Watson's
discovery of the double helix in 1953. He
finished his
degree in 1954. Crick went on to work on
genetic coding and sequencing of
amino acids
in
proteins, serving for much of his career
at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge,
England.
He moved to California to become a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological
Studies in
La Jolla in 1976.
Gamow,
George
George Gamow (1904-1968)
was an astronomer, a physicist, and a contributor to the 1950s
race to crack the genetic code. Born in Odessa,
Russia, Gamow (GAM-off) graduated from the
University of Leningrad in 1926 and earned
a
Ph.D. from the same university three years
later. Gamow came to the United States in
the
summer of 1934 as a visiting fellow at the
University of Michigan, and that fall he
began
teaching at George Washington University,
where he stayed until 1956. He then served
on the
faculty of the University of Colorado at
Boulder until his death in 1968. Gamow, who
expanded
and popularized the Big Bang theory, was
known for his ability to explain complex
theories to
students and lay audiences. He won a prize
from UNESCO for popularizing science in 1956.
He
made great contributions to astronomy in
the areas of star activity, creation of the
elements, and
theorizing about the genetic code. His exclusive RNA
Tie Club entered the genetic code
race
in the 1950s, but none of the members were
able to beat Nirenberg and Matthaei to find
the
answer.
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Heppel,
Leon
Leon Heppel (1912- ) headed a
laboratory at NIH in the 1950s and helped
Marshall Nirenberg with his
coding research. After receiving his Ph.D.
from the University of California at Berkeley,
Heppel
came to NIH in 1942 to study the structure
and metabolism of nucleic acids. He was
studying
RNA and DNA in the late 1950s and helped
provide Nirenberg and Matthaei with synthetic
RNA
for their experiments. Heppel moved on
to become professor of biochemistry, molecular
and cell
biology at Cornell University, where he
is now emeritus. He has won several awards
in his
career and is a member of both the National
Academy of Science and the American Academy
of
Arts and Sciences.
Holley,
Robert
Robert Holley (1922-1993)
shared the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine with
Marshall Nirenberg and Har Gobind Khorana
and served as a professor at Cornell University
and
the Salk Institute. Holley graduated from
the University of Illinois in 1942 and
went on to earn
his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Cornell
in 1947. He worked at Cornell as a professor
and
research chemist at the United States Agricultural
Laboratory and the Geneva Experimental
Station until 1966, when he moved to the
Salk Institute and the Scripps Clinic in
La Jolla,
California. He joined the faculty of the
Salk Institute as a resident fellow and
professor of
molecular biology in 1968. Holley earned
several awards, including the prestigious
Lasker
Award in 1965 and the 1968 Nobel Prize
for his work on the structure of RNA.
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Khorana,
Har Gobind
Har Gobind Khorana (1922- ) shared the 1968
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with
Marshall Nirenberg and Robert Holley. Khorana
is from Raipur, a small town in what is now
Pakistan. He attended Punjab University in Lahore,
India, earning a B.S. degree in 1943 and a
master's two years later. Khorana then
left for England, where he obtained his Ph.D.
at the
University of Liverpool in 1948. After a postdoctoral
fellowship in Zurich, Khorana worked in
India, in Cambridge, England, and at the British
Columbia Research Council before settling in
at
the Institute for Enzyme Research at the University
of Wisconsin in 1960. It was there that he
did the genetic research that won him the Nobel
Prize. In 1970 Khorana moved on to become
professor of biology and chemistry at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, where his group
was the first to synthesize a biologically active
gene and where he determined the exact order
of
the nucleotides in the codon triplets.
Leder,
Philip
Philip Leder (1934- ) was
a postdoctoral fellow in Marshall Nirenberg's
laboratory who went on to
become an important researcher in the field of
oncogenes (cancer causing genes). Leder earned
his B.A. in biochemical science at Harvard in
1956 and graduated from medical school there
in
1960. He served in Nirenberg's laboratory as a
postdoctoral fellow for the Public Health Service
and
studied nucleic acids. He worked in the Biochemistry
Department of the graduate program of the
Foundation for Advanced Education in the Sciences
at NIH and became director of the
Laboratory of Molecular Genetics there in 1972.
In 1980 he moved on to become professor of
genetics at Harvard and became a senior researcher
at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in
1986. Leder is best known for his research in
understanding the genes that carry the code for
cancer.
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Matthaei,
Heinrich
Heinrich Matthaei (1929- ) was a postdoctoral
fellow at NIH in 1960 and 1961 and worked with
Marshall
Nirenberg on the fateful experiments to crack
the genetic code. Having earned his Ph.D. in
Germany in 1956, Matthaei arrived at NIH in
November 1960 on a NATO Fellowship intended
to give him the resources he would need to achieve
cell-free protein synthesis. He joined
Nirenberg's laboratory in time to work with him
on the cell-free experiments using synthetic
mRNA,
showing that messenger RNA was the catalyst to
protein synthesis. It was Matthaei who
performed the particular experiment in May 1961
that showed that poly-U coded for the amino
acid phenylalanine. After completing his postdoctoral
fellowship at NIH, Matthaei returned to
Germany and joined first the Max Planck Institute
for Biology in Tubingen, then the Max Planck
Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen.
Nirenberg,
Marshall
Marshall Nirenberg (1927- ) spent his entire scientific
career at NIH, where he did the experiments
leading to the discovery of the genetic code
for which he shared the Nobel Prize in 1968.
Nirenberg was born in New York City but spent
much of his childhood in Florida. He graduated
from the University of Florida with a degree
in zoology and chemistry and moved on to earn
his Ph.D. in biological chemistry at the University
of Michigan. After graduating in 1957 he came
to NIH to work as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases. He earned a permanent
position and spent the next several years on
his work with the genetic code, which he published
to great acclaim in 1961. In the subsequent
years he worked with colleagues to discover
the entire code for all twenty amino acids.
Later, he continued his work in molecular genetics
at NIH.
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Singer,
Maxine Frank
Maxine Frank Singer (1931- ) assisted Marshall Nirenberg
in his coding research and went on to run her
own laboratory at NIH and serve as president
of the Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C.
Singer graduated from Swarthmore College and
earned her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Yale University
in 1957. After two years as a postdoctoral fellow
in Leon Heppel's laboratory at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases.
Singer took a permanent position at NIH. She
joined the Laboratory of Biochemistry in 1975
and served as chief of that laboratory from 1979 until
1988, when she became president of the Carnegie
Foundation, a group that funds fundamental science
research. During her term at the Carnegie Foundation,
she continued to act as scientist emerita at
NIH, until her laboratory finally closed in 1997.
Stetten,
DeWitt, Jr.
DeWitt Hans Stetten Jr. (1912-1990)
was the medical director of intramural research
at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic
Diseases in the 1950s when Marshall Nirenberg
did his coding research. Stetten earned his
undergraduate degree at Harvard in 1930, his
M.D. at Columbia University in 1934, and his
Ph.D. at Columbia in 1940. After a decade of
teaching and research at both of those institutions,
he moved on to the Public Health Research Institute
in New York City in 1948 and to NIH in 1954.
Stetten left NIH to become dean of the Medical
School at Rutgers University in 1965 but returned in 1974 to become NIH Deputy Director for Science. He acted
as a consultant to NIH from 1970 until his death
in 1990. One of Stetten's legacies to
NIH was the organization of the museum of medical
research that now bears his name.
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Watson,
James
James Watson (1928- ) shared
the Nobel Prize with Francis Crick in 1962 for
their
identification of the double helix as the shape
of DNA. Watson earned his B.A. at the University
of Chicago and went on to complete a Ph.D. at
Indiana University in 1950. Watson met Crick
when they both worked at the Cavendish Laboratory
at Cambridge University in England. Both
interested in the structure of DNA, they built
the first successful model of the nucleic acid
in
1953. Watson's best-selling book The Double
Helix, published in 1968, recounted the years
of
DNA research. In 1956 Watson moved on to the
biology department at Harvard, where he
studied RNA. He became director of the Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory in 1968, where he has
been ever since. He has helped to make Cold Spring
Harbor a center for molecular genetics and
cancer research, among other topics. Watson ran
the Human Genome Project at NIH from 1988
to 1992.
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