Nobel Prize Recipient. Marshal Warren Nirenberg was honored in 1968 with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "breaking the genetic code." He shared this coveted award with H. Gobind Khorana, a Pakistan-American scientist, and Dr. Robert W. Holley of California Institute of Technology. Born into a Jewish family in New York, he was raised in Florida after suffering rheumatic fever as a child. He earned his bachelor's in 1948 and master's degrees in 1952 from the University of Florida, and, in 1957, his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan; he immediately went to work for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was to remain for the rest of his professional life. Focusing on protein synthesis, Dr. Nirenberg and his associate Dr. Johann Heinrich Matthaei developed, in 1961, a cell free system in which to construct proteins, and to attempt to find the codon governing each of the amino acids that comprise them. A codon is a triplet nucleic acid sequence, three units of DNA unique to each of the 20 amino acids used to make proteins. When adding an RNA molecule containing only uracil to the system, the protein resulting consisted of the one amino acid phenylalanine; thus, the codon for phenylalanine is UUU. The 1962 Nobel Prize recipient, Francis Crick had previously established that the codon was a triple sequence, but had not identified any. Dr. Nirenberg presented his findings at a 1961 conference in Moscow, and later at a much larger gathering, triggering a race to find the other 63 possible codons; he and his partners won the race, and though others have expanded on his work, he remains the original code-breaker. He later performed research in neurobiology, but never made a discovery comparable to his first. Dr. Nirenberg shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine for 1968; his other honors were many, including at least five honorary doctorates, the 1966 National Medal of Science, and in 1968 National Medal of Honor and sharing with Khorana, Louisa Gross Horowitz Prize from Columbia University. Dr. Nirenberg was the first NIH Nobelist and also the first federal scientist to receive a Nobel Prize. He married twice, but had no children.