Marshall Nirenberg came to the NIH in 1957 as a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. DeWitt Stetten, Jr.'s laboratory. By the end of the following year he had found his research calling. He decided to concentrate on nucleic acids and protein synthesis, thinking this might lead to something more. He wrote in his research notebook, “would not have to get polynucloetide synthesis very far to break the coding problem. Could crack life's code!” Nirenberg spent the next few years on the first part of his task: creating experiments to show that RNA could trigger protein synthesis.
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Heinrich Matthaei and Marshall Nirenberg (right)
In a laboratory on the seventh floor of Building 10 on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, Marshall Nirenberg–by now an employee of NIH–and his post doctoral fellow Heinrich Matthaei were hard at work on the coding problem by 1960.
