Phoebus Levene

Not to be confused with Phoebus Levin, German painter.

Phoebus Levene

Structural formula of a proposed tetranucleotide, later shown to be incorrect. It was proposed by Phoebus
Levene around 1910

Phoebus Aaron Theodore Levene, M.D. (25 February 1869 – 6 September 1940) was
an American biochemist who studied the structure and function of nucleic acids. He
characterized the different forms of nucleic acid, DNA from RNA, and found that DNA
contained adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine, deoxyribose, and a phosphate
group.[citation needed]
He was born into a Litvak (Lithuanian Jewish) family as Fishel Rostropovich Levin in
the town of Žagarė in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, but grew up in St.
Petersburg. There he studied medicine at the Imperial Military Medical Academy
(M.D., 1891) and developed an interest in biochemistry. In 1893, because of anti-
Semitic pogroms, he and his family emigrated to the United States and he practiced
medicine in New York City.
Levene enrolled at Columbia University and in his spare time conducted biochemical
research, publishing papers on the chemical structure of sugars. In 1896 he was
appointed as an Associate in the Pathological Institute of the New York State Hospitals,
but he had to take time off to recuperate from tuberculosis. During this period, he
worked with several chemists, including Albrecht Kossel and Emil Fischer, who were
the experts in proteins.
In 1905, Levene was appointed as head of the biochemical laboratory at the
Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research. He spent the rest of his career at this
institute, and it was there that he identified the components of DNA. (He had
discovered ribose in 1909[citation needed] and deoxyribose in 1929[citation needed].) Not only
did Levene identify the components of DNA, he also showed that the components were
linked together in the order phosphate-sugar-base to form units. He called each of
these units a nucleotide, and stated that the DNA molecule consisted of a string of
nucleotide units linked together through the phosphate groups, which are the
'backbone' of the molecule. His ideas about the structure of DNA were wrong; he
thought there were only four nucleotides per molecule. He even declared that it could
not store the genetic code because it was chemically far too simple. However, his work
was a key basis for the later work that determined the structure of DNA. Levene
published over 700 original papers and articles on biochemical structures. Levene
died in 1940, before the true significance of DNA became clear.
Levene is known for his "tetranucleotide hypothesis" (formulated around 1910) which
first proposed that DNA was made up of equalamounts of adenine, guanine, cytosine,
and thymine. Before the later work of Erwin Chargaff, it was widely thought that DNA
was organized into repeating "tetranucleotides" in a way that could not carry genetic
information. Instead, the protein component of chromosomes was thought to be the
basis of heredity; most research on the physical nature of the gene focused
on proteins, and particularly enzymes and viruses, before the 1940s.[1]