1918-

American biochemist and corecipient with Severo Ochoa of the 1959 Nobel Prize in medicine for artificially producing a chemically exact but inert molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a basic component of genes. In 1967 at Stanford University, he headed a team that built on the Nobel Prize work by synthesizing DNA in a biologically active state. He was educated at the University of Rochester, receiving his Ph.D. there in 1943.