Robert William Holley

Robert William Holley (1922-1993), American biochemist and Nobel laureate. Born in Urbana, Illinois, he received a Ph.D. degree from Cornell University and in 1947 was a member of the Cornell University Medical School team that first synthesized penicillin. In 1968 he joined the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California. Holley, the first scientist to determine the sequence of subunits within a nucleic acid, shared the 1968 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with the Indian-born American chemist Har Gobind Khorana and the American biochemist Marshall Warren Nirenberg for their independent studies of the genetic code. See Genetics; Nucleic Acids.