jan 1, 1965 - 1965: Marshall Nirenberg is the first person to sequence the bases in each codon

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In 1957, Marshall Nirenberg arrived at the National Institute of Health as a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. DeWitt Stetten, Jr.'s laboratory. He decided to focus his research on nucleic acids and protein synthesis in the hope of cracking 'life's code'.

The following few years were taken up with experiments, as Nirenberg tried to show that RNA could trigger protein synthesis. By 1960, Nirenberg and his post-doctoral fellow, Heinrich Matthaei were well on the way to solving the coding problem.

Nirenberg and Matthaei ground up E.Coli bacteria cells, in order to rupture their walls and release the cytoplasm, which they then used in their experiments. These experiments used 20 test tubes, each filled with a different amino acid - the scientists wanted to know which amino acid would be incorporated into a protein after the addition of a particular type of synthetic RNA.

In 1961, the pair performed an experiment which showed that a chain of the repeating bases uracil forced a protein chain made of one repeating amino acid, phenylalanine. This was a breakthrough experiment which proved that the code could be broken.

Nirenberg and Matthaei conducted further experiments with other strands of synthetic RNA, before preparing papers for publication. However, there was still much work to do - the scientists now needed to determine which bases made up each codon, as well as the sequence of bases within the codons.

Around the same time, Nobel laureate Severo Ochoa was also working on the coding problem. This sparked intense competition between the laboratories, as the two scientists raced to be the first to the finish line. In the hope of ensuring that the first NIH scientist won the Nobel Prize, Nirenberg's colleagues put their own work on hold to help him achieve his goal.

Finally, in 1965, Nirenberg became the first person to sequence the code. In 1968, his efforts were rewarded when he, Robert W. Holley and Har Gobind Khorana were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize.

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