Masayasu Nomura is the American molecular biologist who demonstrated that those ribosomes present in bacteria can be reduced to their molecular components of ribonucleic acid (RNA) and proteins. Four years later he further demonstrated that they can then be reunited to regenerate themselves.

Nomura was born on April 27, 1927, in Hyogo-ken, Japan. He married Junko Hamashima on February 10, 1957; they had two children--Keiko and Toshiyasu. After receiving his Ph.D. in microbiology at the University of Tokyo in 1957, Nomura went to the United States to work as a postdoctoral fellow in Sol Spiegelman 's laboratory. While at Spiegelman's lab, Nomura isolated a kind of RNA that receives information from a bacteriophage (a virus that infects bacteria) genome, then serves as an model for producing the proteins within the bacteriophage. This type of RNA later became known as messenger RNA (mRNA). He then briefly returned to Japan as an assistant professor...