Nirenberg and Matthaei Experiment - Reception and Legacy

Reception and Legacy

In August, at the International Congress of Biochemistry in Moscow, Nirenberg presented his paper. The experimentation with synthetic RNA in a cell-free system was a key technical innovation. In 1961, when they announced their methods for decoding the relationship of mRNA to amino acids, there was still a lot of experimentation required before the entire code was deciphered. The scientists had to determine which bases made up each codon, then determine the sequence of bases in the codons. This proved to be a tremendous amount of work.

In 1964 and 1965, Nirenberg's postdoctoral researcher, Philip Leder, developed a filtration machine that allowed the NIH research team determine the order of the nucleotides in the codons. This development sped up the process of assigning code words to amino acids. By 1966, Nirenberg announced that he had deciphered the sixty-four RNA codons for all twenty amino acids.

For his ground-breaking work on the genetic code, Nirenberg was awarded the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He shared the award with Har Gobind Khorana of the and Robert W. Holley. Working independently, Khorana had mastered the synthesis of nucleic acids, and Holley had discovered the exact chemical structure of transfer-RNA.

The New York Times reported on Nirenberg's discovery by explaining that "the science of biology has reached a new frontier," leading to "a revolution far greater in its potential significance than the atomic or hydrogen bomb." Most of the scientific community saw these experiments as highly important and beneficial. However, there were some who were concerned with the new area of Molecular Genetics. For example, Arne Wilhelm Kaurin Tiselius, the 1948 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, asserted that knowledge of the genetic code could "lead to methods of tampering with life, of creating new diseases, of controlling minds, of influencing heredity, even perhaps in certain desired directions."