Levene, Phoebus

[person]

(February 25, 1869 - September 6, 1940) A Russian-American biochemist who studied the structure and function of nucleic acids, differentiated DNA and RNA (the two types of nucleic acid), and discovered that DNA consists of adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine, deoxyribose, and a phosphate group. Levene is remembered for his "tetranucleotide hypothesis," which he formulated around 1910 and which stated that DNA was composed of equal amounts of adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. Levene thought that DNA was too simple a molecule to carry genetic information, and favored the hypothesis that genetic material was stored instead in protein. Despite his misconceptions, his work contributed greatly to the eventual discovery of the importance of DNA.