Obits in Brief: Marshall Nirenberg

Marshall Nirenberg, who died on 15 January aged 82, was a scientist whose ground-breaking work untangling fundamental genetic processes earned him a Nobel Prize. He was "one of science's great titans", Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said.

Born in New York in 1927 and raised in Florida, Nirenberg was working at the National Institutes when he conducted an experiment with a colleague in 1961. The experiment showed them the way genetic information in DNA is translated into proteins in cells. For his efforts in fully identifying the pieces involved in that genetic translating process, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 with two other scientists.