born Jan. 28, 1922, Urbana, Ill., U.S.
died Feb. 11, 1993, Los Gatos, Calif.
U.S. biochemist.
He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. Holley and others showed that transfer RNA was involved in the assembly of amino acids into proteins. He was the first to determine the sequence of nucleotides in a nucleic acid , a process that required digesting the molecule with enzymes, identifying the pieces, and then figuring out how they fit together. It has since been shown that all transfer RNA has a similar structure. He shared a 1968 Nobel Prize with Marshall Warren Nirenberg and Har Gobind Khorana .