Daniel Nathans

Daniel Nathans
(1928 - 1999)
American microbiologist, corecipient with Hamilton Othanel Smith of the United States and Werner Arber of Switzerland of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1978. The three scientists were cited for their discovery and application of restriction enzymes that break the giant molecules of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) into fragments to permit study of the genetic information they contain.
Nathans attended the University of Delaware and Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., where he earned a medical degree in 1954. He became a professor of microbiology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., in 1962 and director of its department of microbiology in 1972.

In his prizewinning research, Nathans used the restriction enzyme isolated by Smith from the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae to investigate the structure of the DNA of the simian virus 40 (SV40), the simplest virus known to produce cancerous tumours. This achievement, the construction of a genetic map of a virus, heralded the first application of restriction enzymes to the problem of identifying the molecular basis of cancer.