Background
HURWITZ, Jerard was born on November 20, 1928 in New York, United States.
HURWITZ, Jerard was born on November 20, 1928 in New York, United States.
Hurwitz attended, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry in 1949. He received his Doctor of Philosophy in Biochemistry in 1953 from Case Western Reserve University.
He currently works at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York studying deoxyribonucleic acid replication in eukaryotes and its control. Hurwitz joined the microbiology department at Washington University in 1956 and began investigating the incorporation of ribonucleotides into Ribonucleic acid. Two years later, he moved back to New York and became an Assistant Professor of Microbiology at the New York University (New York University) School of Medicine, where he continued to study Ribonucleic acid synthesis. In 1955, Marianne Grunberg-Manago and Severo Ochoa had reported the isolation of an enzyme that catalyzed the synthesis of Ribonucleic acid. However, it was later realized that Ochoa"s enzyme did not use deoxyribonucleic acid to synthesize Ribonucleic acid but instead formed arbitrary sequences, and later this enzyme was found to degrade Ribonucleic acid in cells.
Undeterred by Ochoa"s findings, Hurwitz searched for a cellular Ribonucleic acid polymerase on his own and in 1960 he reported the isolation of Ribonucleic acid polymerase activity from Escherichia coli extracts.
Remarkably, several other research groups reported similar discoveries at roughly the same time (Samuel B Weiss, Audrey Stevens, and James Bonner). Hurwitz continued his research on Ribonucleic acid synthesis, and in 1962 Hurwitz, John Jay Furth, and Monika Anders reported the purification of Ribonucleic acid polymerase.
Biochemical Society of England, American Society of Biological Chemists, North.A.S. 1974.