[Narrator] One summer day, in 1961, Dr. Marshall Nirenberg grabbed the biomedical brass ring
and overnight went from obscurity to stardom, within the scientific community.
And by 1968 he had garnered both the National Medal of Science and the Nobel Prize.
The story really begins in New York City, 1941, when Marshall Nirenberg was 14 years old.
That's when he was stricken with Rheumatic Fever, prompting the family to move from New
York to Orlando Florida. It was pre-Disney Orlando and it was there, roaming the swamps and woods,
the young Nirenberg fell in love with the natural world around him. [Nirenberg] When
I was 13 or 14 collected spiders for the American Museum of Natural History
and got all the kids in the neighborhood to to help collect the spiders and you know being there
was a wonderful opportunity. [Narrator] And while still just a kid, Nirenberg met and was befriended
by a group of biologists, ornithologists and etymologists who were in Florida
teaching jungle survival to military pilots. [Nirenberg] They oriented me, even more than
than I had been oriented before, towards biology, towards science, and they were good
positive influences wonderful influences actually. [Narrator] Nirenberg became a keen observer of
plant life, birds and insects, filling notebooks with graphic details of his observations,
and that training served him well in his later scientific pursuits.
After BS and master's degrees from the university of Florida, Marshall Nirenberg matriculated at the
University of Michigan, where his research and subsequent PhD led to a postdoctoral fellowship
at the NIH's National Institute of Arthritis, Metabolism and Digestive Diseases. [Nirenberg] The
NIH is a wonderful place. It's no frills here but there's a wonderful opportunity to do research.
[Narrator] He came to NIH in 1957 and just 11 years later Nirenberg would win the Nobel Prize
for deciphering the genetic code. His investigations of the relationship between DNA and
RNA, and the production of proteins, paved the way for groundbreaking work in cracking the code.
Nirenberg's life changed forever in 1961. That's when he married Perola Zaltzman, a Brazilian
biochemist and that summer at the International Congress of Biochemistry in Moscow, he presented
his early work on deciphering the genetic code. Some in attendance recalled being electrified.
Suddenly Marshall Nirenberg, whom the Washington Post described as painfully modest,
was world famous, which prompted his former advisor at the University of
Michigan to write a letter in which he jokingly suggested
that he might put up a sign outside his house saying painted by Marshall Nirenberg, A.D. 1953.
Despite numerous job offers from prestigious institutions around the world,
Nirenberg chose to stay at NIH and in 1962 he was appointed chief of the Section on Biochemical
Genetics at the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute. By 1966, Nirenberg had deciphered the
64 RNA Codons for all 20 major amino acids. Codons are the code words of messenger RNA.
That same year, President Lyndon Johnson awarded Dr. Nirenberg the National Medal of Science
and in 1968, Nirenberg's place among the scientific elite was secured when he was awarded
the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. But Dr. Nirenberg was already undergoing a professional
metamorphosis. He wasn't about to rest on his laurels. [Nirenberg] Like turning a crank
and I could do it with one hand tied behind my back so i wanted more of a challenge and
and I was always interested in neurobiology. I didn't know anything about neurobiology really but
even before working on the code I had wondered about going into neurobiology,
so I decided to change fields and try to explore in neurobiology. [Narrator]
Of all the awards and honors garnered over a half century of scientific exploration,
you'll never guess Dr. Nirenberg's favorite. [Nirenberg] My favorite, if you want if you
really want to know my favorite, is I gave a talk in a middle school one time for little kids
and uh and they gave me they gave me an award at the end of the talk that was a bronze hall pass a
lifetime hall pass that allowed me to to go in the hall to go to the bathroom anytime I wanted to.
That's my favorite my favorite award of all of all of them. [Narrator]
For more than a quarter century now, Dr. Nirenberg has maintained his position as Senior
Research Biochemist and Chief of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics at the National Heart, Lung
and Blood Institute. [Nirenberg] Throughout the years of course there have been many opportunities
to go take other positions elsewhere and universities and so forth and almost invariably
the pay is higher, you get more space elsewhere, you can work with more people and certainly,
I would say, the prestige is higher but I've never found a place that where I thought it would be
better where I thought I could do better research than than at the NIH. [Narrator] And, through the
years, Dr. Nirenberg has always demonstrated a strong activist tendency. When it comes to
taking a stand on social or political issues, related to science, he believes strongly in using
the clout that comes with being a Nobel Laureate. [Nirenberg] Absolutely I think that's important.