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Jerard Hurwitz is an American biochemist who co-discovered RNA polymerase in 1960 along with Sam Weiss, Audrey Stevens, and James Bonner. He currently works at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York studying DNA replication in eukaryotes and its control.
Hurwitz attended Indiana University, earning a B.A. in Chemistry in 1949. He received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1953 from Western Reserve University. Hurwitz joined the microbiology department at Washington University in 1956 and began investigating the incorporation of ribonucleotides into RNA. Two years later, he moved back to New York and became an Assistant Professor of Microbiology at the New York University School of Medicine, where he continued to study RNA synthesis.
In 1955, Marianne Grunberg-Manago and Severo Ochoa had reported the isolation of an enzyme that catalyzed the synthesis of RNA. This enzyme was at first hoped to be responsible for the synthesis of RNA in cells, and Ochoa's discovery was honored with a Nobel prize in 1959. However, it was later realized that Ochoa's enzyme did not use DNA to synthesize RNA but instead formed arbitrary sequences, and later this enzyme was found to degrade RNA in cells. Undeterred by Ochoa's findings, Hurwitz searched for a cellular RNA polymerase on his own and in 1960 he reported the isolation of RNA polymerase activity from Escherichia coli extracts. Remarkably, several other research groups reported similar discoveries at roughly the same time. Hurwitz continued his research on RNA synthesis, and in 1962 Hurwitz, John J. Furth, and Monika Anders reported the purification of RNA polymerase.
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