Robert W. Holley
Robert William Holley (born January 28, 1922 in Urbana , Illinois , USA ; † February 11, 1993 in Los Gatos , California , USA) was an American biochemist and Nobel Prize winner.
Holley was the son of teachers. He studied chemistry from 1938 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a bachelor's degree in 1942. He continued his studies at Cornell University with a dissertation on a topic from organic chemistry and a PhD in 1947 and was then a lecturer at the State College of Washington in Seattle . In 1948 he became Assistant Professor, 1957 Associate Professor and later Professor of Biochemistry at Cornell University, where he worked as a research chemist for the US Plant, Soil and Nutrition Laboratory until 1964. From 1968 he was a Resident Fellow at the Salk Institute in La Jolla and also an Adjunct Professor at the University of California, San Diego .
Holley succeeded in isolating a transfer RNA for the first time in 1962 , and two years later he sequenced the alanine tRNA. This was the first t-RNA to be sequenced (77 nucleotides, later corrected to 76). Building on this, he proposed the cloverleaf structure of t-RNA in 1965, which was also confirmed by other representatives of t-RNA. He later worked on the control substances for cell division in mammals.
In 1965 Holley received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research , in 1966 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and in 1968 to the National Academy of Sciences . In 1967 he received the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology and in 1968, together with Har Gobind Khorana and Marshall Warren Nirenberg, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the interpretation of the genetic code and its role in protein synthesis .
literature
- Winfried R. Pötsch (lead), Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989, p. 209 f.
- Gisela Baumgart: Holley, Robert William. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 610 f.
Web links
- Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1968 award to Robert W. Holley
- Spectrum Lexicon of Biology
Individual evidence
- ^ Robert W. Holley, Jean Apgar, George A. Everett, James T. Madison, Mark Marquisee, Susan H. Merrill, John Robert Penswick, Ada Zamir: "Structure of a Ribonucleic Acid", in: Science , 1965 , 147 , Pp. 1462-1465; doi : 10.1126 / science.147.3664.1462 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Holley, Robert W. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Holley, Robert William (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American biochemist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 28, 1922 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Urbana , Illinois |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 11, 1993 |
| Place of death | Los Gatos , California |