SciTech Tuesday: Robert W. Holley, Biochemist and Nobel Laureate

Dr. Robert W. Holley with transfer RNA pictured in background. Courtesy of United States Department of Agriculture.

Today marks the birthday of Dr. Robert W. Holley, an American biochemist who studied penicillin for the wartime Committee on Medical Research. As a graduate student at Cornell University Medical College, Holley worked with Dr. Vincent du Vigneaud to chemically synthesize a form of the antibiotic called penicillin G. While du Vigneaud and Holley were the first chemists to make penicillin by artificial means in 1946, penicillin G was unstable and often broken down by the body before it could be absorbed into the bloodstream. The more common and stable form of the antibiotic, penicillin V, was not synthetically produced until 1957.

Later in his career, Holley shared the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for describing transfer RNA, linking DNA with protein synthesis. Our genetic material known as deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, contains genes, discrete sections of code that carry the information for making a specific protein. Transfer or tRNA decodes the sequence contained in DNA and interprets that code by assembling proteins with building blocks called amino acids. Holley’s research into this process, called translation, was critical in understanding the mechanism by which our genes are expressed.

Post by Annie Tête, STEM Education Coordinator