Holley, Robert William (1922-1993), an American biochemist, shared the 1968 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with the American biochemist Marshall Warren Nirenberg and the Indian-born chemist Har Gobind Khorana. The prize was awarded for their independent researches that led to an explanation of how certain units of genetic material within a cell control the synthesis of proteins and to a better understanding of genetic coding.
Following a year of research at the California Institute of Technology in the United States (1955-1956), Holley became interested in the chemistry of ribonucleic acids, one of the two classes of nucleic acids found in living cells. A ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a complex substance consisting of repeated sequences of molecules bound together into a giant supermolecule. The molecular sequences are of distinct types and make up a code for the generation of certain other types of molecules. By 1960, Holley and other researchers had worked out that some molecular subunits of an RNA, known as transfer RNA’s, played a role in the building up of proteins. By 1965, Holley had shown by experiment the chemical structure of the transfer RNA responsible for incorporating the amino acid alanine into a protein. Also in 1965, he showed that the bacterium Escherichia coli (better known as E. coli) contained five such transfer RNA’s, each one providing the code for a different protein. See RNA .
Holley was born in Urbana, Illinois. He gained the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in organic chemistry from Cornell University in 1947 and was part of the team at Cornell’s medical school that made the first successful synthesis of penicillin. From 1948 to 1964, he conducted biochemistry research at the state and federal agricultural experimental stations at Cornell. In 1968, Holley became a fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies at La Jolla, California. He became a professor at the University of California, San Diego, in 1969.
