Gamow, George 1904-68
US physicist

Born in Odessa, Ukraine, he was educated at Leningrad (now St Petersburg) University, where later he was Professor of Physics (1931-34). After research at the universities of G�ttingen, Copenhagen and Cambridge he moved to the USA as Professor of Physics at George Washington University (1934-55) and at Colorado University (1956-68). In 1948, with Ralph Alpher and Hans Bethe, he suggested an explanation for the universal abundance of chemical elements based on thermonuclear processes in the early universe, and he was a major expounder of the 'Big Bang' theory, still the accepted model for the creation of the universe. In molecular biology he made a major contribution to the problem of how the order of nucleic acid bases in DNA chains governs the synthesis of proteins from amino acids. He realized that short sequences of the bases could form a 'code' capable of carrying information directing the synthesis of proteins, a proposal shown by the mid-1950s to be correct.