Leonard Lerman, whose scientific work in the 1950s and 1960s shaped today’s theories of the triplet code, where three nucleotides of DNA code for each amino acid in the structure of proteins, died on Sept. 19 at his home in Cambridge, Mass., the New York Times reports.
His work had great significance even beyond determining how many nucleotides were involved in the translation of DNA to proteins. “His research shaped the way we manipulate and analyze DNA,” the Times quoted Barbara J. Meyer, a professor of genetics at the University of California, Berkeley, as saying. “His approaches have facilitated the diagnosis of mutations associated with human genetic diseases.”
He was widely known as a “creative” rather than simply “smart” scientist. Stories can be found of him inventing little gadgets on the spur of the moment, such as a device to mute the sound on a TV long before remote control devices were invented, the Times noted.