The Least Likely Man - Marshall Nirenberg and the Discovery of the Genetic Code
Marshall Nirenberg And The Discovery Of The Genetic Code
- Editore:
MIT Press
- Collana:
- The Mit Press
- EAN:
9780262529938
- ISBN:
0262529939
- Pagine:
- 200
- Formato:
- Paperback
- Lingua:
- Inglese
Descrizione The Least Likely Man - Marshall Nirenberg and the Discovery of the Genetic Code
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.
