Marshall Nirenberg | Nobel scientist, 82

Marshall Nirenberg, 82, a scientist who deciphered the genetic code of life and won a Nobel Prize, died of cancer last Friday in New York.

He was "one of science's great titans," said Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.

He was in his mid-30s working at the NIH when he conducted an experiment with colleague Johann Heinrich Matthaei of Germany in 1961, showing for the first time the way genetic information in DNA is translated into proteins in cells.

He took his discovery to a conference in Moscow and spoke about it to a small group of scientists. One of them, knowing what a big discovery it was, asked Mr. Nirenberg to repeat his talk in front of a larger group. He did, thus taking it out to the larger scientific world.

He continued his work over the years, meeting the challenge of fully identifying the pieces involved in that genetic translating process. For his efforts, he earned the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1968, sharing the award with two other scientists.

Mr. Nirenberg was aware of the broader societal impact of his work, writing in Science magazine that the general public needed to understand scientific advances to make the best decisions on how to use them. "When man becomes capable of instructing his own cells, he must refrain from doing so until he has sufficient wisdom to use this knowledge for the benefit of mankind," he wrote.

- Associated Press