Marshall Warren Nirenberg

Marshall Warren Nirenberg was an American biochemist and geneticist. He shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 with Har Gobind Khorana and Robert W. Holley for breaking the genetic code and describing how it operates in protein synthesis. In the same year, together with Har Gobind Khorana, he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University.

Nirenberg was born in New York City, the son of Minerva and Harry Edward Nirenberg, a shirtmaker. He developed rheumatic fever as a boy, so the family moved to Orlando, Florida to take advantage of the subtropical climate. He developed an early interest in biology. In 1948 he received his B.S. degree, and in 1952, a masters degree in zoology from the University of Florida at Gainesville where he was also a member of the Pi Lambda Phi Fraternity. His dissertation for the Masters thesis was an ecological and taxonomic study of caddis flies . He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1957.

Source: Wikipedia