born July 29, 1910, Breslau, Ger.
died April 10, 1999, Oakland, Calif., U.S.
German-born U.S. biochemist.
He received his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh and moved to the U.S. in 1936, eventually joining the faculty at UC-Berkeley. Studying the tobacco mosaic virus, he broke it down into its noninfectious protein and nearly noninfectious nucleic acid components and, by recombining them, successfully reconstituted the fully infective virus, which led to the discovery that the nucleic acid portion is responsible for its infectivity and, in the absence of the viral protein, is broken down by RNA-splitting enzymes (nucleases).