Memoir

Cyrus Levinthal

Columbia University

May 2, 1922 - November 4, 1990


Scientific Discipline: Genetics
Membership Type:
Member (elected 1970)

Cyrus Levinthal made many groundbreaking discoveries in the field of molecular biology. He described the process of how viral DNA in bacteria replicate and undergo recombination. He also found that there is a direct relationship between a gene and the amino acid sequence it codes. Levinthal observed the instability of messenger RNA (mRNA) in bacterial cells. This helped to explain how bacteria can rapidly modify gene expression depending on their environment. He was one of the first people to use computational 3-dimensional imaging to observe protein structure and cellular networking.

Levinthal graduated from Swarthmore College in 1943 and earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950. He taught physics at the University of Michigan until 1957 when he joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a professor of biophysics. From 1968 until his death he was a professor of biology and the head of the biological sciences department at Columbia University.

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