Leonard Lerman, a molecular biologist who worked with Sydney Brenner and Francis Crick, made a name for himself in the late 1950s when he identified chemicals that would insert themselves between the two strands of the DNA double helix in a process known as intercalation, causing the molecule to unwind and sometimes inducing mutations. The discovery paved the way for understanding how a gene can be read to generate a protein.
Last month (September 19), Lerman died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at age 87 from complications of a chronic neurological disease.
Lerman was working at the University of Colorado School of Medicine when he made his initial discoveries, but shortly after, in 1959, he moved to the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, to work for a sabbatical year with Brenner and Crick. Just 6 years earlier, Crick and James Watson had discovered the ...
