Fraenkel-Conrat, Heinz Ludwig

▪ 2000

      German-born American biochemist (b. July 29, 1910, Breslau, Ger. [now Wroclaw, Pol.]—d. April 10, 1999, Oakland, Calif.), settled a fundamental scientific question when he discovered that the genetic information controlling viral reproduction resides in the inner nucleic acid component of each virus rather than in a virus's protein case. He was educated at the University of Breslau (M.D., 1933) and the University of Edinburgh (Ph.D., 1936) and in 1941 became a U.S. citizen. After working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (1942–50), he joined the Virus Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, as a resident biochemist, and he became a professor at the university in 1958. In celebrated experiments on the tobacco mosaic virus in the mid-1950s, he succeeded in dismantling the RNA and protein components of the virus, after which he infected tobacco leaves by applying a paste of “pure” RNA (without the protein shell) to show that the RNA was responsible for viral infectivity; he also demonstrated that the separated RNA and protein components could be rejoined to reconstitute the virus. He was a corecipient with Gerhard Schramm and Alfred D. Hershey of the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Research in 1958 and the recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships (1963, 1967). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1974. In virology research he often collaborated with his wife, biochemist Beatrice B. Singer, and in his later years he was involved in studies of snake venom neurotoxins and chemical carcinogenesis.

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