(1928-) US microbiologist who shared the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with his colleague Hamilton Smith for their work on restriction enzymes, special enzymes that can cleave genes into fragments.
Born in Wilmington, Delaware, Nathans studied at the University of Delaware and at Washington University, St Louis. From 1962 he worked at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, becoming director of the Department of Microbiology 1972.
In addition to the work done with Smith, Nathans also performed much original research of his own in this field. Using the carcinogenic SV40 virus, he showed in 1971 that it could be cleaved into 11 specific fragments, and in the following year he determined the order of these fragments.