Robert W. Holley

Robert William Holley ( born January 28, 1922 in Urbana, Illinois, USA, † February 11, 1993 in Los Gatos, California ) was an American biochemist.

Holley succeeded in 1962 for the first time the isolation of a transfer RNA, and two years later he sequenced alanine tRNA. In 1965 he received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, the 1967 National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology and 1968, together with Har Gobind Khorana and Marshall Warren Nirenberg received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the interpretation of the genetic code and its function in the protein synthesis.