How unassuming government researcher Marshall Nirenberg beat James
Watson, Francis Crick, and other world-famous scientists in the
race to discover the genetic code. The genetic code is the Rosetta
Stone by which we interpret the 3.3 billion letters of human DNA,
the alphabet of life, and the discovery of the code has had an
immeasurable impact on science and society. In 1968, Marshall
Nirenberg, an unassuming government scientist working at the
National Institutes of Health, shared the Nobel Prize for cracking
the genetic code. He was the least likely man to make such an
earth-shaking discovery, and yet he had gotten there before such
members of the scientific elite as James Watson and Francis Crick.
How did Nirenberg do it, and why is he so little known? In The
Least Likely Man, Franklin Portugal tells the fascinating life
story of a famous scientist that most of us have never heard of.
Nirenberg did not have a particularly brilliant undergraduate or
graduate career. After being hired as a researcher at the NIH, he
quietly explored how cells make proteins. Meanwhile, Watson, Crick,
and eighteen other leading scientists had formed the "RNA Tie Club"
(named after the distinctive ties they wore, each decorated with
one of twenty amino acid designs), intending to claim credit for
the discovery of the genetic code before they had even worked out
the details. They were surprised, and displeased, when Nirenberg
announced his preliminary findings of a genetic code at an
international meeting in Moscow in 1961. Drawing on Nirenberg's
"lab diaries," Portugal offers an engaging and accessible account
of Nirenberg's experimental approach, describes counterclaims by
Crick, Watson, and Sidney Brenner, and traces Nirenberg's later
switch to an entirely new, even more challenging field. Having won
the Nobel for his work on the genetic code, Nirenberg moved on to
the next frontier of biological research: how the brain works.
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