Asset

Date of ingest: 29 June 2026

Description: Marshall W. Nirenberg (1927-2010) was an American biochemist who shared the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for deciphering the genetic code. Beginning in the late 1950s at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, Nirenberg conducted a series of groundbreaking experiments on the chemistry of DNA. By 1966, he and his laboratory staff had figured out how the nucleotide units of RNA direct ribosomes to assemble amino acids into proteins, thereby “cracking” the genetic code of organic life. After winning the Nobel Prize, Dr. Nirenberg moved to the genetic study of cancer cells, brain tumors, and embryonic stem cells. He published widely and maintained a laboratory at the NIH for another four decades until his death in 2010. This chart is the first summary of the genetic code, created by Marshall Nirenberg on January 18, 1965, when more than half of the code had been deciphered. The chart was written on multiple sheets of paper in pencil, India ink, and multiple ball-point pen inks, and held together with adhesive tape. This and subsequent versions of the chart, along with the full collection of Marshall Nirenberg Papers, are available for research onsite at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and online through NLM's Profiles in Science and Digital Collections.